Today Samsung is taking the lid off its new 850 Pro SSD — the first consumer drive to use 3D NAND and the replacement for the 840 Pro, which debuted in 2012. The launch of a 3D NAND drive is particularly important given that vertical NAND is believed to be the future of NAND design and the only possible way to continue pushing SSD drive sizes upwards without compromising reliability or performance.

We’ve covered 3D NAND (Samsung calls its approach V-NAND) multiple times in the past year, so we’ll just touch on the topic here. 3D NAND is flash memory that’s built on edge as opposed to in a conventional planar (2D) configuration. This means that a 3D cell structure is tilted on edge compared to a conventional NAND cell. This dramatically increases NAND density if the cells can be packed tightly enough in the die to make the increased complexity worthwhile.

We’ve written before that Samsung has had some struggles in this field, but the company has evidently conquered enough of the problems to start talking about deploying the tech en masse.

The Samsung 850 Pro packs 32 layers of NAND into each flash chip and there are eight NAND dies total in the 850 Pro, implying that Samsung has significantly improved chip density since the first 24-layer NAND dies were announced. The drive is certified for 150TB of writes — far more than most consumer drives — though obviously no one has had time to throw petabytes of write performance at it to check its durability. The drive is also built on 40nm chips rather than 20nm – but using an older process on 3D NAND isn’t a major issue and allows the drive to benefit from some of the advantages of a larger process.

Overall performance is reportedly excellent, even without Samsung’s drive accelerator technology (now rebranded as Rapid). Samsung, if you recall, acquired cache accelerator company Nvelo last year — the fruits of that acquisition are now paying off for the company. Rapid accelerates a number of common workloads and has matured since Samsung shipped it last year as part of its Drive Magician performance tuning utility.

Right now, the 850 Pro commands a substantial premium over other drives (about twice the cost per gigabyte), but between the excellent Samsung 840 EVO and this new drive, Samsung appears to have the SSD market buttoned up. The commercial success of the company’s V-NAND is important to the long-term future of flash storage — 3D dies are generally considered to be essential to the long-term goal of improving SSD density and performance.