SAMSUNG MZ-QL21T900 PM9A3 1.92TB enterprise SSD

Enterprise U.2 NVMe drive

The Samsung PM9A3 is a 1.92 TB enterprise solid-state drive built for servers and storage arrays that demand consistent throughput. It uses a 2.5 inch U.2 form factor with a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface and the Samsung Elpis controller. V-NAND TLC memory and low-power SDRAM cache support mixed read and write workloads in databases, virtualisation and analytics.

2.5 inch U.2 build and power profile

The drive measures 100.20 mm by 69.85 mm by 7.00 mm and weighs 90.00 g, fitting standard hot-swap bays without adapters. It draws 3.5 W idle, 10.0 W during reads and 12.5 W during writes, so backplane power budgets must account for sustained activity. Rated shock resistance of 1500 G and an operating range of 0 °C to 70 °C suit dense rack environments.

PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe 1.4 limits

Sequential speeds reach 6800 MB/s read and 2700 MB/s write, while random 4 KB performance tops out at 850,000 IOPS read and 130,000 IOPS write. Endurance is 1 DWPD, equivalent to 3504 TBW over the warranty period. Workloads that exceed this write intensity or require higher random write throughput will need a drive with greater endurance.