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If we look back several years, one couldn’t get an enterprise level SSD without direct company contact, and putting a face to business…maybe even with a firm handshake. Things have changed and, as much as many might think easy access may be good or bad, we are seeing ‘off the shelf design’ far more often these days. Right now, one can jump on Amazon and choose their desired form factor, capacity, specific feature set and performance for an enterprise SSD…and have that in hand within a day or two. E-tailers have become the fast food restaurant chains of just about everything and that includes enterprise storage. Silicon Motion isn’t following that route just yet.
On our Test Bench today is the Silicon Motion MonTitan Gen5 7.68TB U.2 Enterprise SSD and it is available as a platform, or ‘Reference Design Kit’ (RDK) through SMI. The MonTitan Reference Design Kits (RDKs) are available in conventional NVMe and the market’s first QLC-based PCle Gen5, Zoned Namespaces, FDP and Multi-Dimensional SSDs for AI Support. Each RDK is purpose-built to support Turnkey Firmware that is power and performance-optimized per application with < 25W SSD average power and < 5W Idle SSD power.
The SMI MonTitan Enterprise SSD is available in U.2, U.3, E1.S (9.5/15/25mm) and E3.x form factors ranging from 8TB to 64TB size variations. It is based on the SMI SM8366 Gen5x4 dual ported 16-channel SSD controlller that has a scalable single/dual channel 40bit DDR4-3200/DDR5-4800 DRAM interface and runs at 2400MT/s. This platform is customizable for KIOXIA and Micron TLC/QLC memory, however, as we are a Canada-based website, we also have the advantage of seeing many SSDs utilizing YMTC NAND flash memory. Such is the case today as our test sample contains YMTC X3-9070 232-layer XTacking 3D TLC NAND flash memory.
The MonTitan feature set includes NVMe 2.0, OCP 2.5, Namespace, Advanced Telemetry, Latency Monitoring, E2E (end-to-end) data protection, secure boot, MPF and SR-IOV (Single Root Input/Output Virtualization), enterprise security with AES 256-bit encryption, flexible data placement and multi-dimensional AI storage. The SMI MonTitan also has ‘Performashape’ which is a multi-stage shaping algorithm to optimize SSD performance on a per user-defined QoS set bases. This is configured in firmware. Combined with using true HW isolation technology, the SM8366 ensures maximum bandwidth performance while maximizing user-defined individual performance elements (QOS, Latency, RR/RW, power).
Performance specifications for the SMI MonTitan are 14.2GB/s read and 9.4GB/s write throughput with up to 3500K IOPS read and 450K write IOPS at 7% over-provisioning. This is a one-drive write per day (1-DWPD) SSD which will have a standard 5-year limited warranty.
Let’s get to the performance!