Samsung Electronics, the world’s largest maker of memory chips, announced Friday it started mass producing the industry’s highest-performing solid-state drive with the largest capacity, making it optimal for on-device artificial intelligence applications for personal computers.

The new PM9E1, which is a PCIe 5.0 SSD, provides a powerful performance and enhanced power efficiency built on its in-house 5-nanometer-based controller and eighth-generation V-NAND technology, the chipmaker said.

“Our PM9E1 integrated with a 5nm controller delivers industry-leading power efficiency and utmost performance validated by our key partners,” said Bae Yong-cheol, executive vice president of memory product planning at Samsung Electronics. “In the rapidly growing on-device AI era, Samsung's PM9E1 will offer a robust foundation for global customers to effectively plan their AI portfolios.”

Key attributes in SSDs, including performance, storage capacity, power efficiency and security, have all been improved from its predecessor, the company said. The sequential read and write speeds have more than doubled, reaching up to 14.5 gigabytes-per-second and 13GB/s, respectively. Power efficiency has also been enhanced by over 50 percent.

"Even with data-intensive AI applications, the faster data transfer allows a 14GB large language model to be transferred from the SSD to DRAM in less than a second," the chipmaker said.

The PM9E1 offers a range of storage options, including 512GB, 1 terabyte, 2TB and the industry's largest capacity of 4TB. The 4TB option is especially an "optimum" solution for PC users in need of high-capacity storage for large files such as AI-generated content, data-heavy programs and high-resolution videos, as well as tasks that require intensive workloads such as gaming, Samsung added.

Samsung has also applied Security Protocol and Data Model v1.2 to the PM9E1, which helps prevent supply chain attacks involving forgery or manipulation of stored data in the product during production or distribution processes.