company news about Scality says Samsung is developing nearline SSDs up to 1 PB

Insights shared during an industry briefing with Scality confirm Samsung is in active development of nearline-class solid-state drives.

The discussion centered on Scality’s Autonomous Data Infrastructure (ADI) solution, and one presentation slide outlined four distinct performance tiers for object storage. The top tier is an ultra-high-performance GPUDirect layer built with TLC NVMe SSDs, followed by a hot data tier equipped with NVMe QLC SSDs and newly emerged NL-SSD products. Designed to strike a balance between speed, reliability and cost efficiency, the warm storage tier adopts three mainstream media types: NL-SSD, nearline hard drives and standard HDDs. As the NL-SSD naming is relatively new to the industry, relevant inquiries were raised to Scality for further clarification.

Scality Chief Product Officer Erwan Girard explained: “This represents a new generation flash memory solution currently under joint development by Solidigm and Samsung. We have obtained sample products for internal lab verification and ongoing testing. The two vendors hold different technical orientations for this new medium. Samsung aims to phase out traditional hard drives via these ultra-high-capacity flash drives. Its nearline SSD product lineup will feature a minimum capacity of 250TB and a maximum capacity reaching 1PB, adopting E3L and E2 standard form factors. In a standard 4U rack unit, users can deploy nearly 50 such drives in total.”

Such extreme storage density enables a single 4U enclosure to hold close to 50PB raw capacity, which translates to roughly 500PB, equivalent to half an exabyte, within a full standard server rack. The industry is curious about the specific flash particle type adopted inside these drives and whether it belongs to conventional QLC flash.

Girard further disclosed its core endurance specifications: “It is an innovative new flash variant, with write endurance roughly one-fifth that of mainstream QLC flash. Measured by the five-year warranty-standard WPD (Writes Per Day) indicator for nearline storage scenarios, its daily rewritable data ratio is only 0.1. In other words, users cannot exceed 10% of the total drive capacity in daily writes within five years to stay within warranty terms. By comparison, mainstream 2026-grade QLC SSDs reach a WPD level of 0.5, making the new medium far less write-tolerant.”

These specs clearly position it as a read-centric optimized storage technology. In terms of actual running speed, the product shows unexpected advantages.

“Initial technical data released by hardware manufacturers suggested relatively mediocre performance, yet our in-lab practical testing delivered different results. At the current testing stage, there is barely noticeable speed gap between this new nearline SSD and regular QLC SSDs.”

Scality CEO Jérôme Lecat supplemented further cooperative background: “We have reached joint development cooperation deals with Samsung’s memory research institute to jointly advance next-generation storage technology iteration. This partnership is non-exclusive, and we also maintain business ties with other flash chip suppliers, while our technical collaboration depth with Samsung remains unmatched. Our self-developed codes have been deployed inside Samsung’s testing labs, and both sides exchange controller chip design progress in depth to explore forward-looking storage technologies, though the detailed internal design logic of Samsung’s nearline flash still remains undisclosed.”

When asked about technical cooperation with SK hynix, another vendor pushing high-capacity SSD roadmap, Lecat responded: “We have no in-depth joint development projects with SK hynix comparable to our partnership with Samsung, and we only keep track of its latest product progress.” He also revealed the launch timeline of Samsung NL-SSD: “There is almost no possibility for Samsung to officially release nearline flash products within this year, and mass commercial launch is more likely to fall in 2027.”

Industry data from VDURA shows current mainstream SSDs are around 20 times more costly per unit capacity than traditional hard drives. Nevertheless, the new nearline SSD boasts over 200 times higher storage density than HDDs. When building a 500PB large-scale storage rack system, this new flash solution can drastically cut overall power consumption and physical space occupation compared with traditional hard disk deployment models. For business scenarios with low daily write volume, NL-SSDs will become a highly cost-effective alternative choice.