Improving SSD QoS for Agentic AI.

Silicon Motion Technology Corp. has unveiled its new MonTitan™ SSD Reference Design Kit (RDK), featuring the company’s next-generation patented PerformaShape™ technology. Designed for Agentic AI infrastructure, the platform enables enterprise SSDs to serve as a persistent memory layer supporting KV cache offload and autonomous AI agents, while delivering predictable QoS, sustained performance, and optimized endurance for dynamic, always-on Agentic AI workloads.

Redefining enterprise storage requirements.
Unlike conventional AI applications, AI agents continuously reason, act, retain context, and interact with external tools, generating diverse data types and rapidly changing access patterns. As AI data centers support continuous, multi-step inference and increasingly large KV caches, enterprise SSDs must deliver high throughput, consistent latency, predictable QoS, and the endurance required for sustained, write-intensive operations.

Next-Generation architecture for predictable SSD QoS.
The next-generation PerformaShape™ technology introduces an enhanced hardware architecture designed to support Multi-Dimensional Shaping for more precise workload management. Combined with integrated performance monitoring and with NVMe TP4176 as API, it helps enterprise SSDs maintain predictable QoS under complex and rapidly changing workloads of multi-tenant and multi-agent use cases.

“AI agents require storage to evolve into a persistent memory layer that retains context and supports continuous autonomous operations,” said Jason Chien, Senior Director of Enterprise Product Marketing at Silicon Motion. “Featuring next-generation PerformaShape™ technology, our new MonTitan™ SSD RDK combines enhanced hardware and software to efficiently manage data flows across multiple agents, reduce resource contention, and accelerate time to market for Agentic AI storage solutions.”

PerformaShape™ has been designed into both Silicon Motion’s SM8366 PCIe 5.0 and SM8466 PCIe 6.0 enterprise SSD controllers. Built on these platforms, the MonTitan™ SSD RDK provides SSD manufacturers with a scalable foundation for developing storage solutions for AI servers and data centers, helping them shorten development cycles and accelerate time to market for Agentic AI applications.

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@silicon_motion #Manufacturing #PAuto

Smart solid state drive.

Samsung Electronics has successfully developed a second generation of its pioneering SmartSSD*.

“Commercialization of the first-generation SmartSSD, in collaboration with AMD, established that the computational storage market has great potential,” said Jin-Hyeok Choi, Executive Vice President and Head of Memory Solution Product & Development at Samsung Electronics. “With the upgraded processing functionality of the second-generation SmartSSD, Samsung will be able to easily address increasing customer needs in the database and video transcoding sectors, as we expand the boundaries of the next-generation storage market.”

The new proprietary computational storage incorporates data processing functionality within a high-performance SSD. Unlike existing SSDs, this SmartSSD can process data directly, thereby minimizing data transfers between the CPU, GPU and RAM. This technology can avoid the bottlenecks that often occur when moving data between storage devices and CPUs, resulting in markedly improved system performance and much higher energy efficiency.

The SmartSSD is playing an increasingly important role, especially with the growth of next-generation technologies such as AI, machine learning and 5G/6G, which require large amounts of data processing.

Leveraging software and intellectual property (IP) developed by customers, along with in-built Arm cores, Samsung’s second-generation SmartSSD enables much more efficient data processing. Compared to conventional data center solid-state drives, processing time for scan-heavy database queries can be slashed by over 50%, energy consumption by up to 70% and CPU utilization by up to 97%.

Since its development in 2020 through the joint efforts of Samsung and AMD, the first-generation SmartSSD is being supplied to global IT companies including video communications platform providers. The first-generation SmartSSD was recognized as an Innovation Awards Honoree at CES 2021 for its outstanding performance and energy efficiency.

“Powered by Xilinx Versal™ Adaptive SoCs from AMD, second-generation Samsung SmartSSDs enable improved CPU efficiency and greatly reduced energy consumption by efficiently integrating the computing and storage functions in data centers,” said Sina Soltani, Corporate Vice President of Sales, AECG, Data Center and Communication Group at AMD. “As data-intensive applications continue to grow, second-generation Samsung SmartSSDs will deliver the superior performance and efficiency required for this expanding market.”

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* Samsung Electronics is leading efforts to standardize SmartSSD technology through close collaboration with the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and with NVM Express, while seeking to expand the boundaries of SmartSSD devices through technological validation for a wide variety of applications.

@Samsung @SNIA @NeeshamPR #Memory #dataprocessing

Fastest SATA 6 Gb/s industrial grade SSDs

The ADLINK ASD Series of SSDs is highly reliable, has an extended operating temperature range, and is able to withstand high levels of shock and vibration. ADLINK SSDs are ideal for applications in telecom, defense, medical, industrial automation and transportation.

AdLink Technology presents their ASD Series of industrial grade solid state drives (SSDs). The AdLink ASD Series is designed to meet the needs of today's mission critical applications in severe environments and reduce time-to-market for rugged platform integrators who require comprehensive solutions to provide embedded platforms with high availability, performance and reliability. These ASD SSDs provide a SATA 6 Gb/s (SATA III) interface to match the data transfer capabilities of 2nd generation Intel® Core™ processor-based platforms and have the fastest read/write speeds available on the industrial market. The AdLink ASD Series offers reliability, ruggedness and extreme performance, allowing AdLink to provide a complete storage solution for its customers.

These industrial grade SSDs deliver low latency with less than 1ms access time, power consumption as low as 2 watts, high reliability and high capacity. The series is available in 2.5”, 1.8” and JEDEC MO-297 (Half-Slim) form factors and is designed for use in enterprise, industrial and embedded computing platforms in fields such as defense, telecom, transportation, industrial automation and medical.

The AdLink ASD Series is well-suited for rugged and embedded environments. It supports a wide operating temperature range from -40°C to 85°C and is resistant to high levels of shock (1,500G/0.5msec) and vibration 3.08G (7-800Hz). SSDs have no spin-up time, seek time or rotational latency, resulting in faster system boot and shorter application load time compared to conventional hard drives. To provide additional reliability, they implement wear-leveling and hardware ECC, resulting in years of reliable operation with minimal maintenance and a mean time between failures (MTBF) of up to 2 million hours.

“Our customers depend on AdLink to provide a total solution in a ruggedized format that is able to operate under the most demanding environmental conditions," stated Stephen Huang, Vice President of the Industrial Computing Product Segment of AdLink. "The AdLink industrial grade ASD SSD Series provides customers with the high data transfer rates of the SATA 6 Gb/s interface, high reliability and long product life in an industrial grade storage solution. With these advanced features and leading NAND flash controller technology, AdLink continues to provide customers with high quality solutions and reliable product support. Our new line of industrial grade SSDs meets the requirements of transportation, avionics, factory floor, and other rugged applications with extended temperature requirements.”

Built using high speed SLC/MLC NAND flash with Toggle-Mode and advanced controller technology, the AdLink ASD Series offers high speed performance of up to 470MB/sec sequential read and 385MB/sec sequential write speed (2.5" 128GB SLC). With no moving parts, ASD SSDs are designed to deliver the durability required by portable devices that are frequently dropped or jostled. In addition to the 2.5" form factor, the AdLink ASD Series offers models in 1.8" form factor with Micro SATA connector and in Half-Slim form factor to provide design flexibility for customers seeking to create next generation ultra-thin rugged devices based on the standard SATA interface. For smoother integration of embedded platforms, the AdLink ASD Series is compatible with the latest Intel-based platforms. Product descriptions and features of the AdLink ASD Series are summarized in Table 1 below: