Newly discovered Microsoft Z1000 SSD baffles experts – no, the world’s most valuable company won’t be selling SSDs anytime soon, but it could be tinkering with data center storage like it did with CPU
A newly discovered Microsoft-branded SSD suggests the tech giant may be – or at least has been – exploring new ways to optimize its data center storage.
The leaked images of a Microsoft Z1000 SSD show a 1TB NVMe M.2 drive, apparently offering sequential read speeds of up to 2,400 MB/s and write speeds of 1,800 MB/s.
The Z1000 SSD, originally revealed by @yuuki_ans on hyperscalers for data centers.
Capacity up to 4TB
In 2018, CNEX Labs closed a $23 million Series D funding round led by Dell Technologies Capital, which also included Microsoft’s M12 venture fund. This money was used in part to fund a proprietary, high-end CNX-2670 controller that delivered 550,000 IOPS, a 25% performance increase over previously available M.2 form factor SSDs at the time. The CNEX Labs controller in the leaked photos is CNX-2670AA-0821.
The SSD has a capacity of 960 GB, consisting of four Toshiba BiCS4 96-layer eTLC chips of 256 GB and features a 1 GB DDR4 RAM cache made by Micron to improve performance.
The leaked ‘engineering sample’, produced on May 18, 2020 when much of the world was in Covid lockdowns, suggests the drive is part of a wider portfolio of SSD models. The design allows for the addition of more DRAM and capacitors, hinting at larger versions.
If Tom’s hardware notes “on both sides of the PCB there are several unused solder pads, presumably for additional capacitors. This implies that there may be larger versions of the Z1000 with 2TB and perhaps even 4TB of space, as more capacity would require more DRAM and capacitors guarantee data protection.”
This isn’t the first time Microsoft has experimented with hardware design for its data centers, having recently unveiled its own brand of silicon hardware to help advance the development and use of AI in enterprises.
SSD: Microsoft Z1000 960GB M.2 22110 NVMe 1.2 (control): CNEXLabs CNX-2670AA-CB2T(19y6w) (cache): Micron (D9VPP) DDR4 1GB MT40A1G8SA-075:E (NAND): Toshiba 3D eTLC – 256 GB TH58LJT1V24BA8H (bics4 96L) https://t.co/pJegEYzsph pic.twitter.com/ifgxTDiiJMMarch 9, 2024