Memblaze PBlaze7 7940 30.72TB NVMe SSD Review

Memblaze 7940 30.72TB Performance by CPU Architecture

Now that we are firmly in the PCIe Gen5 era, we have a number of AMD, Intel, and even AmpereOne platforms to test the drives in to see the differences in performance based on architecture. These are small, but important.

Since that is hard to read, we have a zoomed-in view below without a 0 X-axis.

Overall this seems to be decent performance and directionally similar to the Dapustor drive in this capacity class. While they are not an exact fit, the fact that they both use a Marvell Bravera controller may have something to do with their reactions to being used on different CPU architectures.

It is fun to see that not all PCIe controllers are created equally and that there are differences even based on the platform the drive is put into.

Final Words

There is something special about the 30.72TB class of drives and above. Taking a step back here, we recently saw a Seagate Expansion 28TB External Hard Drive and the HAMR HDD Within and the new Seagate 30TB HAMR IronWolf Pro and Exos M Hard Drives are shipping. Still, this has slightly higher storage capacity while also being physically much smaller and performing at a much higher rate. Of course, the cost of 30TB class SSDs tend to be ~5-6x that of hard drives, but if you want the density and performance, it can make a lot of sense.

These are the types of drives that often find their ways into AI clusters. Even higher-capacity drives are now in the market, but many of those trade capacity for performance by using slow QLC NAND. Our sense is that Memblaze is going to sell quite a few of these drives into AI clusters.