Just a week after Samsung announced they had started mass-producing 3D Vertical NAND, the company has launched a range of solid state drives that use the technology. At this stage the 3D V-NAND SSDs are aimied only at enterprise applications, although Samsung promises that consumer-oriented drives are in the pipeline.

The enterprise-class 3D V-NAND solid state drives come in a 2.5-inch form factor, and are available in 960 GB and 480 GB capacities. Samsung claims these drives are over 20 percent faster and 40 percent more power efficient than equivalent 10nm-class NAND SSDs, while reliability has also been significantly improved.

Samsung's 3D V-NAND technology expands on traditional planar NAND by vertically storing Charge Trap Flash cells, overcoming the scaling limits of 10nm class flash storage. Through a vertical interconnect process, up to 24 layers of cells can be stacked, which allows for high density, high performance chips. Samsung believes it can produce one terabit (128 GB) NAND flash using 3D V-NAND, although initially only 128 gigabit (16 GB) chips are being produced.

E.S. Jung, executive vice president at Samsung, claims that 3D V-NAND will "drive disruptive innovation that can be compared to a Digital Big Bang in the global IT industry". The technology will also contribute to significant growth in the flash memory market, he said. 

Despite announcing the drives, Samsung didn't say when they would be available for enterprise customers to purchase, aside from mentioning that 3D V-NAND SSDs entered production earlier this month. No pricing information is available either, although going by current industry prices for drives this size, we can't imagine they'll be cheap.