The New PCI 4x4 PM9A3 Solid State Drive
Phillip Durst
Samsung Semiconductor, 2022
The success of a company depends on many factors. Arguably, one of the most important factors is the company’s ability to safely and effectively store data. No matter the product, data has to be collected and stored. Maybe it’s financial reports, or user login information, or a library of documents; no matter the format, data is at the heart of it all. Subsequently, businesses must find a way to store and access all these data.
However, there’s more at stake than effective data logging. Businesses today are discovering that they have been sitting on a previously overlooked asset. Businesses are learning more and more that one of their most valuable assets is the data itself. With the growth of Big Data research, new methods exist for mining both processed and unprocessed data. Be it complex data, such as stock reports, or data as simple as website traffic, much can be learned from data.
As a result, businesses find themselves with an emerging need to safely store and quickly access larger volumes of data than ever before. On the other hand, storing data is a much more difficult task than it seems. How does a company physically house that much storage? Or power it? Cool it? Network it? Enter Data Centers.
Data Centers
Several roadblocks to effectively managing data reveal themselves once it comes time to get into the weeds. So many roadblocks that very, very few businesses continue to store their own data on-site. Some of the unique challenges inherent in large-scale data storage include:
Physical space to house to storage.
Power, heating, and cooling of the storage.
Internal network bandwidth for efficiently accessing the data.
Maintaining the safety of data from physical and cyber threats.
Controlling user access.
On the other hand, off-site Data Centers serve as central locations for housing a business’ IT hardware and software for storing, processing, and disseminating data. Through Data Centers, the above concerns (and many others not mentioned) are solved “off screen.” Data Centers take care of the data storage “custodial” work, letting users and developers get on with their daily lives. Moreover, Data Centers solve the storage problem at a much lesser expense.
Specialized facilities to protect storage hardware.
Specialized software and hardware tools.
Increased security, such as secure booting options or data encryption.
Enterprise tools to manage users.
Pay-as-you-go billing that scales with changing storage needs.
All that said, jumping into Data Center storage comes with its own risks, and it can be difficult to break down the tools a good Data Center needs.
What Makes a Data Center “Good”?
A Data Center is itself the sum whole of the many parts and pieces mentioned above all working together. The remainder of this article focuses on the most important piece: the physical hard drives.
First and foremost is what type of drive being used, a traditional hard disk drive (HDD) or a more contemporary solid state drive (SSD). In the simplest terms, a HDD uses physical means to literally write the data onto the drive; conversely, a SSD has no moving parts and stores data in built-in circuits. While HDD certainly maintain their relevance in some applications, a few reasons to go SSD are:
Speed – SSD work much faster than HDD.
Reliability – SSD last longer, draw less power, and idle more often.
Workload – SSD can handle more tasks at once.
Easy of use – SDD use easier hardware interface standards for installation.
For these reasons, a business needs to store its data on SSD. Which means, Data Center architects need to stay on the cutting-edge of SSD technology.
While it’s easy enough for a business to understand the need for a Data Center, actually creating the storage is no small task. Data Center architects, the ones actually realizing all these lush benefits, have a heavy burden to bear. There’s a good reason businesses don’t want to handle the speed, security, and reliability of large-scale data storage: it’s hard.
Data Center architects have to provide faster, safer, and more reliable storage at lower rates every year. The expectations of users are lofty, and the cost of failure can be in the millions. The good news is, the needs of storing this much data are met more so by the physical SSD hardware than any onboard software. Starting from the best possible SSD makes housing data much easier.
In light of the major role the SSD itself plays in data storage, Samsung has developed the next-generation PM9A3 SSD.
Solving the Storage Problem with the Samsung PM9A3 SSD
The constant need to improve storage hardware and keep pushing the envelope of the possible is voiced throughout the hardware storage community. Furthermore, Samsung’s continued support of data engineers is evident. As put by Ross Stenfort, Hardware Storage Engineer at Facebook, “Innovations .. are key to solving today’s data center challenges. Samsung ... is focused on delivering superior thermals, performance, and serviceability compared with today’s solutions. Deploying storage at scale is very challenging and Samsung’s support for next-generation industry-leading technologies … is a great step forward.”
Which raises the question, what are these “industry-leading technologies?” This new SSD is built using several leap-ahead technologies. To begin with, it leverages the PCI Express 4 x4 hardware interface. PCI3 Gen 3 is nearly a decade old and comes up wanting in the modern market. On the other hand, the Express 4x4 runs at 16 GT/s - twice the speed of the Gen 3. Using hardware accelerators, the PM9A3 has twice the read and three times the random write performance.
In addition to hardware acceleration, the PM9A3 also uses firmware to triage services. The firmware prioritizes sustained random workloads to keep the most important and consistent tasks running the smoothest. It does so by intelligently suspending flash erase and program operations to prioritize incoming read requests. Therefore, the SSD keeps the things that have to run running smoothly and the things that need to run less frequently from interrupting the good stuff.
To summarize, the PM9A3 is as fast as a SSD can get. Additionally, it checks the safety box with multiple layers of protection. It uses hardware-based encryption, managed using the TCG Enterprise standard. Meanwhile, the SSD also has a secure boot feature that verifies every firmware image prior to execution. The most dangerous threat to data security is attacks on the SSD firmware, and the secure boot feature nullifies this threat.
Lastly, the PM9A3 brings with it both reduced power consumption and built-in protection against power loss. As to power consumption, the benefits of the PM9A3 actually come with no added power requirements. For power loss, the SSD has both the standard power loss protection (PLP) feature and added internal safeguards.
Even a short drop in access to data due to power failure can bring business to a halt. Not only that, a sudden and complete power loss can destroy any internally cached data on the Data Center drives. To combat this, the PM9A3 has the built-in ability to detect a power failure. In so doing, the drive can actually draw the remaining energy in the PLP hardware to write cached data into flash memory. Meaning not only does the new SSD provide the standard protection from gradual power loss but also a means of saving data in the event of unexpected total power loss.
Putting it all together, the Samsung PM9A3 SSD exceeds expectations for Data Center needs. It provides all the benefits of other SSD with added features not found elsewhere. The SSD stores more data, faster, cheaper, and safer, which is exactly what every Data Center needs.
Or, as Cheolmin Park, vice president of Memory Product Planning at Samsung Electronics, summarized these needs “Wider 5G deployment and accelerating growth in IoT devices are fueling a hyperconnected lifestyle, driving the demand for more sophisticated hyperscale data centers. Providing the perfect mix of performance, power, reliability, and firmware, we believe our new PM9A3 will help advance today's data center technologies and expand the market for OCP-compliant SSDs."