Pricing announced for Samsung's 850 PRO SSD series featuring 3D V-NAND

Samsung had annonuced its latest flagship consumer SSD series - the Samsung 850 PRO - in the first week of July. This series will feature Samsung’s proprietary three-dimensional V-NAND or vertical NAND chips. The 850 PRO was unveiled at the Samsung SSD Global Summit in Seoul on July 1. It will have SSDs in the 128GB, 256GB, 512GB and 1TB. capacities. It will be available in 53 markets globally this month onward.   The prices of the SSDs are as follows. Please note the Indian prices are direct conversions and do not take into account future taxes or duties that may be levied on the SSDs.

• 128GB - $129.99 USD ($1.02/GB) approx Rs 7780 (Rs 61/GB)
• 256GB - $199.99 USD ($0.78/GB) approx Rs 12000 (Rs 47/GB)
• 512GB - $399.99 USD ($0.78/GB) approx Rs 24000 (Rs 47/GB)
• 1TB - $699.99 USD ($0.68/GB) approx Rs 41900 (Rs 41/GB)

[caption id=“attachment_226687” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”] Samsung 850 PRO series comes with Samsung’s proprietary 3D V-NAND chips[/caption] The current flash memory uses planar NAND cells and with each successive generation we are seeing a shrinking of the die size. While this helps get the SSD prices down, it also hits the endurance limits of the NAND. So while 34nm MLC NAND had an endurance of 5000 program/erase (P/E) cycles, the 19nm MLC NAND has a 3000 program/erase cycle endurance. Ultimately you will reach a limit with the shrinking and the P/E cycles will also take a hit. This is an issue that Samsung is trying to address with the V-NAND memory. [caption id=“attachment_226685” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”] The evolution of NAND technology from the planar structure to 3D structure[/caption] Instead of going the planar-way, Samsung’s three-dimensional V-NAND (Vertical NAND) flash memory is fabricated using an innovative vertical interconnect process technology to link the multiple layer 3D cell array based on Samsung’s 3D Charge Trap Flash (CTF) structure. Traditional NAND cells use a floating gate architecture where the charge is stored in the floating gate which is the conducting material.   Samsung uses its technique called the charge trap flash, which uses an insulator in place of a conducting floating gate and stores charge in the insulating material temporarily. For the V-NAND, Samsung has converted the planar CTF design to a non-planar one where the silicon substrate is in the centre surrounded by the insulating material which is then surrounded by the control gate. According to Samsung this addresses the scalability issue as well as reduces interference between the cells thereby increasing endurance. More technical details such as number of layers, process node, etc., are awaited.   According to Samsung, the 850 PRO’s sequential read performance reaches up to 550 megabytes per second (MB/s), with write performance of up to 520MB/s. Random read performance is up to 100,000 input/output operations-per-second (IOPS), with write speeds of up to 90,000 IOPS. Also, Samsung is claiming that the V-NAND SSDs will offer 20 percent performance improvement and 40 percent less power consumption. The drive also offers a Dynamic Thermal Guard feature, which maintains ambient temperature while operating and prevents potential data loss from overheating. We can verify these figures only after testing the drive.