If you’re a PC user and are looking to improve your gear set-up, then you might want to check out what Samsung has to offer. The South Korean electronics giant announced a new product in the form of a high-performance PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, the PM9C1a. It incorporates Samsung’s 5-nanometer (nm) process and the company’s seventh-generation V-NAND technology, allowing it to provide users with top-tier computing and gaming performance in PCs and laptops. According to Yong Ho Song, Executive Vice President of Memory Solution Product & Development at Samsung Electronics:
“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. We are committed to creating storage that satisfies the diverse and changing market requirements as we continue to advance innovation in the PC SSD space.”
With that said, the PM9C1a SSD is also ideal for everyday use alongside more demanding computing and gaming tasks. With a PCIe 4.0 interface, the PM9C1a comes with 1.6x faster sequential read speed and a 1.8x faster sequential write speed than Samsung’s previous storage offering (PM9B1), with up to 6,000 megabytes per second (MB/s) and 5,600MB/s speeds. Furthermore, Samsung says that the product’s random read and write speeds can support up to 900K input/output operations per second (IOPS) and 1,000K IOPS, respectively.
The company also boasts better power efficiency, as PM9C1a also offers up to 70% more power efficiency per watt compared to its predecessor, meaning that the new SSD can handle the same amount of tasks while using considerably less energy. Should a connected notebook PC go into standby mode, the SSD will use approximately 10% less power.
Samsung has also designed the PM9C1a to incorporate advanced security features. The SSD supports the Device Identifier Composition Engine (DICE), a security standard created by the Trusted Computing Group (TCG), a global organisation responsible for developing open standards for computing security. DICE securely generates cryptographic keys inside the SSD, providing device authentication to protect against supply chain attacks and firmware tampering, to name a few.
In terms of availability, Samsung’s PM9C1a SSDs can be purchased in 256GB, 512GB and 1TB storage capacities in a M.2 form factor (22mm x 30mm, 22mm x 42mm, 22mm x 80mm).
The PM9C1a joins several other new Samsung products which were announced earlier this January. The company revealed a plethora of new hardware for consumer and enterprise needs, including a new set of smart monitors, a new smartphone, as well as a new smart home station, all of which were unveiled during the Consumer Electronics Showcase (CES) 2023, held in Las Vegas.
