• Samsung has announced new “high-performance” SSDs for more demanding PC applications.
• The company says the new PM9C1a offers higher read and write speeds, and it is more power efficient than the previous iteration of the product.
• There is no information yet if the SSDs will come to South Africa after production begins in earnest.

Apart from smartphones and home appliances, South Korean electronics giant Samsung also devotes significant efforts to its business focused on storage drives.

Today, Samsung has announced the production readiness of a “high-performance” SSD it’s calling the PM9C1a. The devices have a new controller based on Samsung’s 5-nanometer process and the company’s seventh-generation V-NAND tech.

“NAND” is currently at the top of the range in terms of flash memory for SSDs. V-NAND, or 3D NAND, is the latest of this type of tech and features layers of vertically stacked NAND cells.

According to a press release from Samsung, performance is the main focus of this particular drive, with the company targeting gamers on desktop PCs and notebooks, specifically.

“Our new PM9C1a SSD will deliver a robust combination of superior performance, greater power efficiency and increased security, which are the qualities that matter most to PC users,” enthuses Yong Ho Song, EVP of Memory Solution Product & Development at Samsung.

Samsung says that “top-tier” speed is being offered by the PM9C1a, and that the drive is primed for consumer use. “Every day use” as well as for “more demanding computing and gaming applications.”

Apart from gaming, applications that demand significant processing power like video editing software could also benefit from this SSD.

In terms of numbers, the company says the PM9C1a has 1.6 times faster read speeds and 1.8 times faster write speeds than the previous PM9 iteration (PM9B1).

The PM9C1a can reach read speeds at 6 000MB/s and write speeds at 5 600MB/s. It can also offer 70 percent more power efficiency than its predecessor.

“This means the new SSD can handle the same amount of tasks using significantly less power,” Samsung notes. Additionally, the SSD will switch to using approximately 10 percent less power when connected to a notebook in standby mode.

In terms of security, the PM9C1a supports Device Identifier Composition Engine (DICE), an industrial security standard developed by Trusted Computing Group (TCG).

This standard generates cryptographic keys within the SSD, providing protection from supply chain attacks – says Samsung – which are vulnerabilities that can be found in supplier networks.

The PM9C1a will be available in 256GB, 512GB and 1TB storage capacities. The company has not included any information on when the chips will be available, or in what countries it will be launching once production begins.

Last year, Samsung announced a series of V-NAND chips that it said offered “the industry’s highest bit density.”

Unlike the PM9C1a, these chips were based on Samsung’s eighth-generation V-NAND tech, were much smaller and offered functionality with PCIe 5.0.