Forget Two-Bit NAND, Samsung Announces 3-bit NAND Flash For Solid State Drives

Samsung has started mass producing what it claims is the industry's first high-performance, 3-bit NAND-based solid state drive (SSD) -- PM853T -- for servers and data centers. According to Samsung, the new SSD option will make it easier for data centers to manage workloads related to social networking, web browsing, and email, as well as enhance operation efficiency.

"Following the last year’s introduction of 3-bit NAND-based SSDs for PC markets, our new 3-bit SSD for data centers will help considerably in expanding the market base for SSDs," said Young-Hyun Jun, executive vice president, memory sales and marketing, Samsung Electronics. "We expect SSD market growth will gain momentum as this new SSD delivers significant improvements in data center investment efficiency, leading to full-fledged commercialization of SSDs in IT systems later this year."

Samsung SSD

Samsung's PM853T Series uses 10nm-class 3-bit multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory chips and is available in 240GB, 480GB, and 960GB capacities. Sequential read performance tops out at up to 530MB/s and sequential write performance at up to 420MB/s. The drives are also rated for up to 90,000 IOPS of random reads and 14,000 IOPS of random writes.

There's no word on how much these new drives cost, though Samsung did mention that they deliver a 30 percent increase in manufacturing efficiency compared to SSDs that use 2-bit NAND flash components. In theory, that should make them less expensive than last generation drives.