At FMS 2015, Samsung made a number of new announcements one of which is Samsung’s upcoming PM953 PCIe SSD, which will likely be the successor to the Samsung SM951 we reviewed previously. The Samsung PM953 will come in both the M.2 PCIe and 2.5″ SFF form factors, feature a PCIe Gen 3 x4 interface, and it’ll have full support for NVMe.
Unlike the Samsung SM951 which used planar NAND, the Samsung PM953 will utilize Samsung’s latest 256Gb 48-layer 3-bit MLC 3D V-NAND. This will allow the PM953 to support drive capacities of 480GB and 960GB in the M.2 form factor and 2TB (1920GB) in the 2.5″ SFF form factor. Performance on the drive is rated at up to 1,000/870 MB/s sequential reads/writes and 240,000/19,000 IOPS 4K random reads/writes. The drive will include full enterprise power loss protection and will utilize <8W power under load.
No details on availability is available at this time.
**Update 8/14/15**
We originally posted above that the Samsung PM953 would likely be the successor to the Samsung SM951, but we were recently notified that that information is incorrect. The Samsung PM953 is designed to be for datacenter/enterprise applications while the SM951 will be for client applications.
That being said, we’ve heard rumors of an upcoming Samsung 3D V-NAND based PCIe client SSD that should be announced fairly soon. Samsung will be holding their annual Global SSD Summit at the end of next month, so with any luck we’ll get more information during the event. Be sure to check back for more!
