Whether you choose a hard drive or an SSD for your PC, every drive will eventually come to the end of its life. Hard drives can develop bad sectors, but do manage to keep on working for a while. SSDs on the other hand tend to just die unexpectedly, but Samsung aims to fix that in its new PCIe Gen4 solid state drives.

These SSDs are set to include new technology Samsung is calling fail-in-place (FIP). What FIP technology does is allow a drive to cope if something goes wrong with one or more of the NAND chips it contains. So rather than dying, what's left of the functioning storage chips will continue to work, albeit in a drive that has less storage space available.

FIP goes a step further than that, though, and manages to scan for any damage in the data before relocating it to the remaining NAND chips that work. Samsung has basically built data recovery into its new SSDs.

For now, the SSDs featuring FIP will be for use in data centers where anything that helps ensure data integrity and minimizes the need to switch out storage is going to be welcomed with open arms. With that in mind, Samsung is launching 19 models of SSD called under the names PM1733 and PM1735.

The PM1733 will be offered as six models in a 2.5-inch U.2 form factor offering storage of between 960GB and 15.63TB, as well as four HHHL card-type drives offering between 1.92TB and 30.72TB of storage. Each drive is guaranteed for one drive writes per day (DWPD) for five years. The PM1735 drives are a little more hard-wearing, offering three DWPD for five years, but storage sizes only go up to 12.8TB. For both models, the U.2 versions achieves 6,400MB/s sequential read speeds and 3,800MB/s writes. The HHHL versions manage 8,000MB/s reads and 3,800MB/s writes.

The drives also include two other software innovations. The first is virtualization technology, which allows a single SSD to be divided up into 64 smaller drives making for easy, independent virtual workspaces. The second is V-NAND machine learning technology, which "helps to accurately predict and verify cell characteristics, as well as detect any variation among circuit patterns through big data analytics." By doing so, it results in much higher levels of performance from the drive.

Hopefully, Samsung can perfect FIP in the data center and then start including it in its consumer SSDs in the near future. We'd all like to use SSDs that fail gracefully and don't lose any of our data.

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