With the introduction of a trio of new 845DC EVO 2.5-inch solid-state drives optimized for data centers, Samsung is taking a gamble that its innovative, though risky, triple-level-cell flash technology — with three bits per NAND cell instead of the traditional two — will yield payoffs for big customers before its competition catches up.

Triple-level cell technology was actually introduced by Toshiba in 2008, and first put to use in datacenter-ready form factors in 2012.  But in recent months, it has been Samsung — the world leader in NAND flash memory production, thanks to its position in the consumer market — that has made the most inroads here.

Samsung plans to drive down SSD costs the way Intel and AMD drove down processor costs: by creating mass-produced consumer versions first, driving up production yields and driving down prices, then developing datacenter adaptations at competitive price points.

That acceleration strategy is what put Intel one, then two, steps ahead of AMD in 2009, and Samsung is hoping for the same effect.

While competitor Toshiba still sells its PX series SSDs with 24 nm multi-level cell NAND, Samsung is already mass-producing consumer SSDs based on its 19 nm TLC process.  (Samsung marketing calls this its “10-nm class” process generation, though that’s probably jumping the gun a bit.)

The risky part concerns endurance. After Samsung started shipping 3-bit NAND products last year, early reports said it did not have the endurance of its 2-bit brethren.

Expert reviewers have since found Samsung’s more recent adaptations to have fared much better in practice.

But a Samsung document obtained by DatacenterDynamics FOCUS comparing the company’s existing 2-bit SSDs to its 3-bit line reveals the extent of its dilemma:  While its 800 GB SM1635 server-grade SSDs are rated to sustain 10 full drive writes per day (DWPD) over the first five years of its service life, Samsung’s 240 GB, 480 GB, and 960 GB 3-bit PM853T models are only rated for 0.6 DWPD.  And at 87,000 sustained input/output operations per second (IOPS) for the 3-bit models versus 110,000 IOPS for the 2-bit, the new drives are slower with sustained workloads.

So where’s the gain?  First, very low seek times — a benefit that observers confirmed in their reviews of the consumer-grade models. Second, initial access speed: The PM853T-based units have been independently timed faster in both random and sequential reads than Samsung’s chief competitor in this space, Crucial’s M500 series (known in the enterprise space as Micron Technologies M500).  Third, thanks in large measure to Samsung’s 19 nm process, these drives should sip power like hummingbirds rather than race cars, pulling half the megawatts of Crucial/Micron and a factor of 10 less power than other competitors.

Competitor Intel has been touting active power consumption ratings of 6 watts per drive for its recent data center models.

On Monday, Samsung promised an active power consumption rating of 4 watts.

We could be seeing a new slate of drives that present respectable power performance for database operations, but something more like average performance for the live VM migrations that cloud data centers perform constantly.

Yet with energy prices refusing to go down any time soon, traditional data centers may be among the first to learn whether investing in 3-bit drives is a fair tradeoff.