Toshiba is announcing development of their newest flagship enterprise SSDs, both featuring Toshiba’s latest generation of 64-layer 3D BiCS FLASH™ memory. The PM5 is a 12Gbit/s SAS series of drives, while the CM5 is their new enterprise NVMe drive. Both are built with Toshiba’s latest 64-layer 3D 3-bit-per-cell enterprise-class TLC (triple-level-cell) BiCS FLASH™, allowing today’s demanding storage applications to expand their use of flash via the cost-optimized 3D flash memory. The PM5 and CM5 are raising the bar for enterprise storage performance, and will create new opportunities for users to leverage the benefits and power of flash storage.

The PM5 series is offered in capacities of up to 30.72TB in a 2.5” form factor, with a full range of endurances and capacities, allowing SAS SSDs in data centers to effectively handle big data requirements, while streamlining storage deployment footprints. The PM5 features the industry’s first MultiLink SAS architecture, and delivers industry-leading performance to the tune of up to 3350MB/s sequential reads and 2720MB/s sequential writes (in MultiLink mode), as well as random 4K reads of up to 400,000 IOPS (in MultiLink mode). The PM5’s 4-port MultiLink design is technology that achieves performance that is close to that of PCIe SSDs, and can be used by legacy storage systems to increase performance significantly without having to re-engineer them from the ground up. The PM5 series also supports multi-stream write technology, which intelligently groups data types together and manages them to minimize write amplification and garbage collection; which translates to lower latency, better endurance, increased performance and improved Quality of Service (QoS).

The CM5 series is a full-featured enterprise SSD series, with a dual-port PCIe Gen3 x4 interface. The CM5 series also supports multi-stream write technology, and is NVMe over Fabric-ready with both scatter-gather list (SGL) and controller memory buffer (CMB) features. The CFB function utilizes a portion of DRAM on the SSD as a host-system memory, which reduces DRAM use on the host-side, and enables high speed as a system. This equates to random 4K read performance of up to 800,000 IOPS, with random 4K write performance of up to 240,000 IOPS (5 DWPD version), or up to 220,000 IOPS (3 DWPD version); either one drawing a maximum of 18W of power.

The CM5 series is also being used as a platform to demonstrate and enable the ecosystem around Persistent Memory Region (PRM) capabilities. PRM allows users to augment system memory with DRAM on the SSD without requiring costly non-volatile NV-DIMMS. This technology allows a single SSD to provide both high-performance storage and persistent memory to meet demanding performance storage requirements, yet significantly lowering costs by moving metadata operations (such as logging, journaling and application staging) to the SSD.

According to Steve Fingerhut, Toshiba’s senior vice president and general manager, SSD business unit, “We are proud to be first to market with new enterprise flash innovations to further broaden our enterprise SSD portfolio and re-writing the rules for enterprise SSDs using 3D TLC FLASH. Toshiba’s customers demand more out of storage and Toshiba delivers enterprise solutions that fit application needs.”

The PM5 12Gbit/s SAS SSDs are being offered in capacities as low as 400GB, and as high as 30.72TB, all with sanitize instant erase (SIE) and Trusted Computing Group (TCG) compliance. The CM5 NVMe SSDs are being offered in capacities from 800GB up to 15.36TB, also with SIE and TCG. Both series offer industry standard endurance ratings, with options for 1, 3, and 5 DWPD. The PM5 also offers a 10 DWPD version.

Toshiba is sampling both the PM5 and CM5 series to select customers, and they will be demonstrating them this week at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California (8/8 though 8/10). You can visit Toshiba at booth #407.