Solid state drives still aren't quite where they need to be in terms of price versus capacity for the masses to shift away from conventional, mechanical hard drives, but they're closer to being the go-to device than ever before. In fact, most mid-to-high end laptops have already made the move entirely to SSD. As these shifts typically go, it starts in the enterprise and trickles down, which is why we're pretty excited about the latest announcement from Dell and Samsung.

The industry's first NVMe PCIe SSD (built by Samsung) is being slotted into Dell's new PowerEdge R920 server. That's a lot of terminology to swallow, but it's a 1.6TB (yes, terabyte!) non-volatile memory express solid state drive. Dell and Samsung are the first to ship PCIe SSDs using the NVMe protocol, which in essence enables faster performance all around. According to Samsung: "Samsung NVMe PCIe SSDs, which can write random data in 25 microseconds, markedly increase the performance of servers, such as those used for big data tasks, and are significantly faster than disk-based arrays in high performance computing applications."


 The 1.6TB, 2.5 inch, SFF-8639 NVMe PCIe SSD provides a sequential read speed of 3,000 megabytes per second, while being able to process random read data at up to 750,000 IOPS (input output operations per second), which is more than three times as fast as conventional high-end SAS 12Gbps SSD storage options.

Samsung’s 1.6TB NVMe PCIe SSD also processes 25 percent more IOPS per watt than 12Gbps SAS SSDs. In addition, its “power loss protection” capability ensures that data issued by the host system can be written to storage media without any data loss in the event of a sudden power failure.

For those who aren't in need of such space, 400GB and 800GB units are also available. Per usual, pricing isn't broadly available, but it'll no doubt cost a pretty penny.