The fastest storage you can get with money today is a Samsung 990 PRO PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD (Solid State Drive). It offers up to nearly 7.5GB/s in read speeds and up to nearly 7GB/s in write speeds. That is faster than what you can get even in your next-generation gaming consoles like the PS5 and the Xbox. The new SSD Samsung introduced is nothing like that.
This is the PM9C1a, a PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD that is made for everyday use. It will not hit speeds like the 990 PRO drive. It reads at a mere 6,000MB/s and writes up to 5,600MB/s. You are still getting read/write speeds beyond what the next-generation gaming consoles can do. That means while the PM9C1a is not made for gaming specifically, the SSD will do just find even with the most demanding AAA games available.
Since it is an everyday high-performance storage, Samsung has to build some reliability and security into the device. The SSD supports Device Identifier Composition Engine (DICE) security standard. It generates cryptographic keys within the SSD. What that does is provide some from of protection from supply chain attacks that targets vulnerabilities from a separate network. The measure also prevents the firmware within the SSD to be tampered, adding some operational reliability.
Of course, because this SSD might find its way to offices around the world, you want the device to be as economical and efficient as possible to keep operational costs low. Samsung fitted the PM9C1a with their 5nm technology controllers and seventh-generation V-NAND memory modules. The result is a 70% increase in power efficiency over the older PM9B1. In that sense, you can run the SSD at a lower power draw but at the same or even better performances over the older storage. In a notebook PC, the SSD even turns itself down and consumers 10% further less power in standby mode.
Samsung has not announced the exact availability date of the new PM9C1a SSD in the market. We are expecting the SSD to hit the stores sometime in February 2023, at least for the Malaysian market. They have not mentioned a specific price to their latest SSD either. Based on prices of the older generation Samsung PM9B1, you can expect the latest SSD to start at over MYR 200 (256GB). There will be three configurations for the PM9C1a SSD – 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB. They will also be available in the most popular M.2 form factors – 22mm x 30mm. 22mm x 42mm, and 22mm x 80mm. For more information regarding Samsung’s latest memory modules, you can head over to their website.
