Samsung has officially launched its business SM843 and SM1625 SSDs, which were introduced back in September. Although the fast Serie 840 Pro SSD is a much more appealing option for consumers, especially the SM1625 is a big step for Samsung. It's the manufacturer's first SSD to feature a Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface.The SM843 uses the trusty SATA 6 Gbit/s interface and is intended for small to medium-sized businesses. The SSD combines one of Samsung's own controllers, with 20 nm MLC flash chips.

The storage device is of the 2.5-inch type, has a 7 mm thickness, and will be available in 120, 240 and 480 GB models. Due to overprovisioning, the actual available capacity is slightly smaller than with consumer models. Samsung has specified read and write speeds of 520 and 420 Mbyte/s respectively, while random reads and writes are claimed to be 70.000 and 11.000 IOPS.

The top model, the SM1625, has two SAS 6 Gbit/s connectors. Combined with the proper hardware, this provides a total bandwidth of 12 Gbit/s. This model has similar components to the SM843, but offers capacities of 100, 200, 400 and 800 GB, in a 15 mm thick casing. Samsung claims that the drive's dual-port SAS interface allows it to reach read/write speeds of 848 and 740 Mbyte/s respectively. Random reads and writes of 101.000 and 41.000 IOPS are specified. Especially the latter is a significant increase over the SM843 drive. It's remarkable that the expectations of the drive during its initial announcement have been lowered slightly. Nevertheless, only few SSDs can meet this level of performance.



Unsurprisingly, Samsung has yet to mention a price for its new drives. It's likely that they will be featured in ready-made business solutions, which makes their unit price less important.

Source: Hardware.Info