- Samsung’s PM1763 entered mass production as the fastest SSD on paper, focusing solely on AI data centers as its key market.
- The PM1763 offers read and write speeds of 28.4 GB/s and 21.9 GB/s respectively, essentially double that of its predecessor, the PM1753.
- The drive cannot be physically used in consumer PCs as it adheres to an EDSFF-only form factor while also requiring PCI-E 6.0 lanes, something that is not yet available to end users.
Samsung has announced that it is now mass producing the PM1763 SSD, which aims to replace the PM1753 as its highest-end enterprise-class SSD for AI customers.
The PM1763 offers read speeds of 28,400 MB/s and write speeds of 21,900 MB/s, taking advantage of PCIe 6.0 connections.
It uses the company’s 9th generation V-NAND, along with a 4nm controller, to deliver these speeds even as PCI-E 6.0 offers twice the bandwidth per lane available to users.
A very fast SSD that narrowly beats the competition where it matters
Samsung’s offering is, at the time of writing, undoubtedly the fastest SSD available to enterprise customers on paper, but it does have some caveats.
The company claims that the PM1763 offers “industry-leading performance,” and that’s definitely true in both the reading and writing departments, especially the latter, but it barely ekes out a win in the former over the Micron 9650.
The Micron 9650 offers read speeds of 28,000 MB/s and much slower write speeds of 14,000 MB/s sequentially, and also takes advantage of PCI-E 6.0 to deliver that performance.
However, Samsung’s SSD is decisively faster in another metric that is key for AI customers: it offers 6.92 MIOPS in sequential read speed versus Micron’s 5.5 MIOPS.
However, Micron’s offering has already been in mass production since February 2026 and is expected to enjoy greater availability for the rest of the year than Samsung’s enterprise flagship.
Samsung’s offering also incorporates other advantages: it offers power efficiency that the semiconductor giant says is 1.8 times better than the PM1753 and supports post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms and the TEE Device Interface Security Protocol (TDISP).
It should be noted that both Micron and Samsung’s offerings are only part of the puzzle, as enterprise consumers are currently preparing for the next generation of server hardware. Both Nvidia’s Vera and AMD’s EPYC “Venice” platforms offer the PCI-E 6.0 connectivity these drives need to run at top speeds.
One would expect similar gains soon in the consumer market, where Samsung’s Gen 5-based 9100 Pro is one of the few currently ruling the roost with advertised read and write speeds of 14,800 MB/s and 13,400 MB/s, respectively, but that could be wishful thinking at best.
The gains from PM1763 are not expected to trickle down to consumers for a multitude of reasons. Mainly, PCI-E 6.0 compatible hardware does not currently exist on the consumer end, even as data centers begin to adopt it.
The next-generation storage on offer is also expected to be prohibitively expensive, pitting consumers against data center customers with seemingly limitless pockets for now, and industry figures like Phison’s CEO are already warning that AI demand will keep NAND and DRAM in short supply until 2026; Consumer storage is increasingly being built from what data centers don’t use.
So the PM1763, at least from an end-user perspective, could also be a proof-of-concept SSD; It’s unlikely to arrive on their desks anytime soon, and they’re unlikely to be able to afford it unless they want to host a data center-type server at home.
The era of Gen 6 storage has arrived, connected to hardware you can’t buy, in a shape you can’t assemble, on an interface you don’t have, built from NAND that would never reach you anyway. Unfortunately for enthusiasts looking for a faster SSD: the speeds are real. So is velvet rope.
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