INTRODUCTION

    Even though the very first consumer SATA SSDs released just under 2 decades ago introduced performance levels new to everyone durability wasn't their strongest selling point (several models died inside a single year, some inside a few days during my tests). Needless to say, today things have improved massively in that regard but If I once again was to nitpick, I'd point out that high performance doesn't always go hand to hand with durability when it comes to consumer oriented SSDs, quite the opposite actually. This of course doesn't apply for enterprise/industrial type SSDs and with demand for such drives on the rise it's no surprise to see more storage manufacturers design and release such models in the market. Memblaze is one such manufacturer and today with me I've got their most popular model to date, the PBlaze7 7940 3.84TB U.2 PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD.

    Memblaze is a leading provider of enterprise-class SSD products and solutions, founded in Beijing in 2011, the PBlaze series of enterprise SSDs launched by Memblaze has been widely used in database, virtualization, cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence and other fields, providing stable and reliable high-speed storage solutions for Internet, cloud services, finance and telecommunications industries. Memblaze has been committed to independent development and innovation, owning over 200 flash technology patent applications, covers key areas such as flash memory management, data protection, power control, hardware design, and has R&D centers in Beijing, Shanghai, Suzhou and Chengdu.

    The PBlaze7 7940 series of PCIe 5.0 SSDs by Memblaze was released back in August 2023, is available in several different form factors (2.5-inch U.2, E1.S, E3.S, HHHL AIC) and capacities (3.84/7.68/15.36/30.72TB) and is based on the Bravera SC5 (MV-SS1333) PCIe 5.0 NAND flash Controller by Marvell. Memblaze has paired the Bravera SC5 NAND flash controller with Micron's B58R FortisMax 232-layer 3D TLC NAND flash (2400MT/s speed) and a grand total of 4.6GB DDR4 DRAM 3200Mbps (22-22-22 timings) by Nanya (for the 3.84TB model which I have with me here). The Marvell Bravera SC5 (MV-SS1333) PCIe 5.0 NAND flash Controller is a 10-core, 16CH E1.S model (Arm Cortex-R8, Cortex-M7 and Cortex-M3 processors) which is equipped with technologies like Marvell's 5th generation of NANDEdge (low-density parity coding - LDPC), AES-256 Encryption (FIPS compliant), end-to-end data path protection (full), TRIM, multi-namespace, EUI64/NGUID, crypto erase, firmware upgrade without reset, timestamp, weighted round robin, variable sector size management, latency statistics & high latency logging, telemetry, sanitize, secure download, secure Boot, get LBA status, write zeroes, write uncorrectable, TCG OPAL 2.0, 128K write atomicity, NVMe-MI, ARP and flexible power management. As with similar data center oriented SSDs the PBlaze7 7940 also comes with complete power failure protection and as for durability/endurance Memblaze reports an MTBF (meantime between failures) of 2.5 million hours (TBW for the PBlaze7 7940 U.2 3.84TB model should be at around 7000).