Samsung and Xilinx release a Super Smart SSD

The virtual Flash Memory Summit kicked off this week with numerous innovative and creative technologies being showcased, the highlight of which was Samsung and Xilinx’s unique Super Smart Solid State Drive.

The SSD features Xilinx’s Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) which allows data processing within the Drive itself. This is truly a revolutionary piece of technology as it allows the Smart element to be included within an SSD.

The SSD, named Samsung SmartSSD Computational Storage Drive (CSD), will be the industry’s first adaptable computational storage platform. The device will be equipped to perform tasks that would normally be given to the processor to complete, thus reducing time and performance overheads. These drives can also compress data in a unique way, allowing for an increase in the apparent storage capacity of the device.

The CSD can be programmed through any Xilinx Vitis software platform. This could prove extremely useful when building cutom applications. RT libraries, APIs, and any drivers can be written using any common programming language. Users can also make use of existing Vitis libraries.

Xilinx claims the CSD can improve data processing time by up to 10 times the original. This could be extremely useful for applications such as database management, video processing, artificial intelligence layers, complex search, and virtualization.

The Samsung SmartSSD Computational Storage Drive is a 2.5-inch SSD encased in a 25-watt power envelope. Storage capacities go up to 4TBs, which could be increased to 12 TBs when combined with the device’s accelerated transparent compression method. Hardware acceleration within the device is achieved by the integrated Xilinx Kintex UltraScale+ FPGA accelerator which features more than one million system logic cells and nearly 2,000 DSP slices.

Samsung’s SmartSSD CSD is available for pre-order and will begin shipping by January through Xilinx and its distributors.