Last fall, several enterprise SSD vendors reached out to us around the same time, offering review samples of their latest and greatest. We put together an updated test suite for enterprise and datacenter SSDs and spent more than a month hammering the drives. Our review of two SATA drives was published first, but this review of 9 NVMe drives is what we've really been looking forward to. These multi-TB drives show just how far NVMe can go beyond the limits of SATA and SAS SSDs.

Two of the products we're looking at today come from familiar manufacturers. Samsung is the dominant player in the SSD market, shipping more drives than the next three companies combined. We have their PM1725a in house: an older flagship model, but still the fastest we've ever tested with almost twice the random read performance of an Intel Optane SSD. SK Hynix sent over their PE6011, a low-power entry-level datacenter U.2 drive that is part of their strategy to reestablish a foothold in market segments where they have faltered in recent years.

We also have two new brands featured in one of our reviews for the first time. DapuStor and DERA are two Chinese drive manufacturers that have been around for a few years but have until recently been focusing on their domestic market. DERA's strategy is more centered around developing home-grown technology to compete with foreign suppliers by designing their own SSD controller. DapuStor worked with familiar names like Marvell and Kioxia/Toshiba to create datacenter SSDs focused on efficiency, while also pursuing a long-term roadmap toward advanced in-house tech.

Nine new drives adding up to 40TB of high-end storage might seem like a lot, but it's barely enough to to cover the breadth of the enterprise SSD market. No two of these models are in direct competition. Enterprise SSD product segments can be defined in terms of form factor, write endurance, capacity and performance. Different use cases will call for a different kind of drive, and there's no one size fits all solution.

Reviewed Models Overview

(Drives Tested in Bold) Model Interface Form Factor Capacities Memory Write Endurance

(DWPD) DapuStor

Haishen3 H3000 PCIe 3.0 x4 2.5" 15mm U.2 1 TB

2 TB

4 TB

8 TB 96L 3D TLC 1 DWPD DapuStor

Haishen3 H3100 PCIe 3.0 x4 2.5" 15mm U.2 800 GB

1.6 TB

3.2 TB

6.4 TB 96L 3D TLC 3 DWPD DERA

D5437 PCIe 3.0 x4 2.5" 15mm U.2 2 TB

4 TB

8 TB 64L 3D TLC 1 DWPD DERA

D5457 PCIe 3.0 x4 2.5" 15mm U.2 1.6 TB

3.2 TB

6.4 TB 64L 3D TLC 3 DWPD SK Hynix

PE6011 PCIe 3.0 x4 2.5" 7mm U.2 960 GB

1.92 TB

3.84 TB

7.68 TB 72L 3D TLC 1 DWPD Samsung

PM1725a PCIe 3.0 x8 HHHL AIC 1.6 TB

3.2 TB

6.4 TB 48L 3D TLC 5 DWPD Previously Reviewed by AnandTech: Micron

5100 MAX SATA 2.5" 7mm 240 GB

480 GB

960 GB

1.92 TB 32L 3D TLC 5 DWPD Samsung

883 DCT SATA 2.5" 7mm 240 GB

480 GB

960 GB

1.92 TB

3.84 TB 64L 3D TLC 0.8 DWPD Samsung

983 DCT PCIe 3.0 x4 2.5" 7mm U.2 960 GB

1.92 TB 64L 3D TLC 0.8 DWPD Intel

DC P4510 PCIe 3.0 x4 2.5" 15mm U.2 1 TB

2 TB

4 TB

8 TB 64L 3D TLC 0.7–1.1 DWPD Intel Optane

DC P4800X PCIe 3.0 x4 HHHL AIC 375 GB

750 GB

1.5 TB 3D XPoint 60 DWPD Memblaze

PBlaze5 C916 PCIe 3.0 x8 HHHL AIC 3.2 TB

6.4 TB 64L 3D TLC 3 DWPD Note: Tested capacities are shown in bold

To provide some more meaningful comparisons, we've retested and included several other enterprise SSDs from previous reviews.