Fresh off reviewing a pair of equally priced SATA enterprise SSDs, AnandTech's Billy Tallis rounds up a group of PCI Express enterprise SSDs to show how multi-terabyte NVMe drives reach beyond the limitations of SATA and SAS options.

Tallis' testing group of 9 NVMe enterprise drives, totaling 40TB of storage, includes a mix of well-known manufacturers and ones new to AnandTech. Included in this group is the 6.4TB Samsung PM1725a, a choice that Billy explains is partially due to the supply MyDigitalDiscount.com has available for only 19 cents/GB, along with the rare opportunity of testing a flagship model from a top SSD producer.

Although two generations older than most in the group, the Samsung PM1725a is still a high-end enterprise SSD with an endurance rating of 5 drive writes per day. Featuring Samsung's S4LP049X01 "EPIC" controller, PCIe 3.0 x8 interface, NVMe revision 1.2, and 8TB of flash, Tallis describes the PM1725a as:

"Fast enough that most software cannot even come close to fully using its performance potential."

The seemingly outdated Samsung PM1725a drive even held some advantages over newer drives with the highest read performance in peak sequential testing, beating the second-place 6.4TB Memblaze PBlaze5 by over 1500MB/s, and reaching over 1M IOPS for random read testing, as Tallis deems it:

"By several metrics the fastest SSD we have ever tested, and one of only two drives in our collection that can hit more than 1 million IOPS for 4kB random reads."

The PM1725a did show some of its age however, ranking a distant third in steady-state random write performance. Billy attributed this to the drive's older NAND and controller that, "sometimes struggles to match the latency of newer drives."

Additionally, the sheer scale of the PM1725a could limit its usability because, as Tallis points out, "not every server can accommodate and make productive use of a drive that is this powerful."

Wrapping up his review, Tallis acknowledges that each of the 9 SSDs tested had their individual strengths and weaknesses as manufacturers look to fill a variety of enterprise customer needs. When it came to the Samsung PM1725a, Tallis concludes that:

"The fact that MyDigitalDiscount is currently selling a limited stock of them at consumer SSD pricing means a lot of customers can try out this class of drive for the first time."

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Samsung 6.4TB PM1725a 5DWPD Enterprise TLC V-NAND PCIe 3.0 x8 NVMe HHHL Card SSD