Samsung mass-produces 16TB PCIe 6.0 SSD hitting 28.4 GB/s – enterprise AI only, not for consumers

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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 28.4GB/s and 21.9GB/s respectively, essentially twice that of its predecessor, the PM1753

The drive can't physically be used in consumer-grade PCs, adhering to an EDSFF-only form factor while also requiring PCI-E 6.0 channels, something that has yet to be available to end-users

Samsung has announced 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, leveraging 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 double the per-lane bandwidth available to users.

A very fast SSD that narrowly beats the competition where it matters

Samsung's offering is, at the time of writing, without doubt, the fastest SSD available to enterprise clients on paper, but it does have a few caveats.

The company claims the PM1763 offers "industry-leading performance", and that is definitely true in both the read and write 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, also leveraging PCI-E 6.0 to deliver such performance.

Samsung's SSD is decisively faster on another metric that is key for AI customers, however: it offers 6.92 MIOPS in sequential read speed versus Micron's 5.5 MIOPS.

Micron's offering, however, 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 gains: it delivers power efficiency that the semiconductor giant says is 1.8x better than the PM1753 and supports both post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms and the TEE Device Interface Security Protocol (TDISP).

It must be noted that both Micron and Samsung's offerings are only part of the puzzle, as enterprise consumers are currently gearing up for the next generation of server hardware. Both Nvidia's Vera platform and AMD's EPYC "Venice" offer PCI-E 6.0 connectivity that these drives need to run at maximum speeds.

One would expect similar gains soon in the consumer market, where Samsung's Gen 5-based 9100 Pro is one of the few that currently rule the roost with advertised read and write speeds of 14,800 MB/s and 13,400 MB/s, respectively, but that might be wishful thinking at best.

The gains from the PM1763 are not expected to trickle down to consumers for a multitude of reasons. Primarily, PCI-E 6.0-supporting hardware does not currently exist at the consumer end, even as datacenters begin to adopt it.

The bleeding-edge storage on offer is also expected to be prohibitively expensive, pitting consumers against datacenter clients with seemingly limitless pockets for now, and industry figures such as Phison's CEO are already warning that AI demand will keep NAND and DRAM in shortage through 2026; consumer storage is increasingly built from what the data centers do not take.

The PM1763, therefore, at least from an end-user's perspective, might as well be a proof-of-concept SSD; it is unlikely to make its way onto their desktop anytime soon, and they are unlikely to be able to afford it unless they want to host a data-center-class server at home.

The Gen 6 storage era has arrived, attached to hardware you cannot buy, in a shape you cannot mount, on an interface you do not have, built from NAND that was never going to reach you anyway. Sadly for enthusiasts looking for a faster SSD: The speeds are real. So is the velvet rope.