Samsung 983 ZET SSD Enterprise

Samsung has moved into the market that aims to fill the gap between system memory and storage with its new 983 ZET SSD. So far in this arena we’ve seen, not necessarily the most performant drives, but drives with very low latency. The 983 ZET is an NVMe SSD designed specifically for low latency (with claims Quality of Service (QoS) read/writes of up to 0.03ms at a minimal 20μs latency) for high-performance computing applications as well as emerging technologies that are becoming more common such as AI and IoT.

The Samsung 983 ZET leverages a half-height, half-length (HHHL) form factor with PCIe Gen3 x4, NVMe 1.2 interface. Somewhat surprising here is that the drive is built off of Samsung’s V-NAND (despite initial Z-NAND marketing) as opposed to some new NAND technology. V-NAND is no slouch when it comes to performance; in fact it tends to lead the field in the testing we’ve done. V-NAND has also proven itself thoroughly for performance, reliability, and overall quality. On the performance side, the 983 ZET is quoted to deliver up to 3.4GB/s and 3GB/s sequential read/write speed, respectively, as well as up to 750K IOPS and 60K IOPS random read/writes, respectively.

For our review of the Samsung 983 ZET we will be testing both the 480GB and the 960GB capacities. At the time of this writing these are the only two capacities offered and again mirror the trend in the gap between memory and storage we’ve seen thus far.

Samsung 983 ZET Specifications