Toshiba Announces 3D Flash With 48 Layers 42
Lucas123 writes: Admitting it has bumped up against a 15 nanometer process wall, Toshiba announced it's focusing its efforts on three dimensional NAND using its Bit Cost Scalable technology (PDF) in order to increase capacity. It has dedicated a Japanese fab plant to it and developed 48-level 3D NAND, which bumps density up 33% over previous 3D NAND flash. The new 3D NAND will be able to store 128Gb of data per chip (16GB). Samsung has been mass producing 32-layer, triple-level cell (TLC) 3D NAND since last October and has incorporated it into some of its least expensive SSDs. Yesterday, Micron and Intel announced their own 32-layer 3D TLC NAND, which they claimed will lead to 10TB SSDs. While Toshiba's 3D NAND is multi-level cell (meaning it stores two bits per transistor versus three), the company does plan on developing a TLC version. Toshiba said it's not abandoning 15nm floating gate flash, but it will focus those efforts on lower capacity applications.
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In Soviet Russia, humanity serves inventions!
Flash With 48 Layers (Score:1, Funny)
That's a lot of clothing for a guy who could just jog down to the Sahara in a couple minutes.
Captcha: exertion
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Isn't this a duplicate from yesterday?
http://hardware.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]
Oh yeah, that piece of astro-turf was about Intel and micron
Wouldn't it be nice if we could just get a company neutral submission about the technology and not the branding?
3D flash ... (Score:5, Funny)
The butting edge (Score:2)
Man, porn is driving the craziest shit.
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Huh, but SSD's are also a lot faster on sequential reads than mechanical disks.
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I got modded down a few times here (unsurprisingly) when I mentioned who needs more than 1 TB besides some niche use. Everyone and their brother went on how creating a NAS from scratch and their database project at work was average Joe stuff and I didn't know what what I was talking about.
I think the Steam hardware survey is a pretty good indication, of the people on steam only 23.5% have >1TB disk space. And they're probably way above average as the average officer worker (no, not you with the MSDN collection and 14 VMs) sure doesn't use that much, nor the kind of people who could use a Chromebook. The "problem" for HDD manufacturers though is that they've killed any interest in anything but $/GB. The most typical big media people have is video and it's accessed linearly and for that har
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I do. 90% of users aren't gamers or Warez freeloaders contrary to slashdot opinion. With large games peoplease only have time for a few and lots of small ones. With me an mMO. Now playing star wars the old republic all imperial :-)
But I do have a few hundred gigs of vms. One on a 1 tb mechanical disk. Rest in one of my 2 500 gif ssds raid 0s. 25 gig levels are much nicer on the lader :-)
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Pretty sure you are trolling but... (Score:3)
who needs more than...
Very funny Mr Gates.
I'll just chime in with a real response though: 4K video from home movies.
Not everything is going to go into the cloud.
Just my own personal photos require nearly 8TB now between RAW files and converted images.
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Again nitch. I have not met anyone besides IT folks build their own dvr. I had one said I wasn't a real IT guy if I don't make my own cloud. Really? I open onedrive and drag files. How hard is that? No an external shared disk is not a cloud regardless of the hype from Western digitals marketing department.
Stream is the future
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A DVR works better with a mechanical disk anyway with a fixed bit rate in a continuous motion access
Not really. My DVR can record 2 different channels, while playing back a 3rd one. This would be much better suited to SSD.
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A huge proportion of computing is moving to the cloud. Conventional disk storage is a nightmare for cloud services because there's such a huge disparity between sequential I/O and random I/O performance. CPU, memory, and network bandwidth all divide up nicely, but as soon as you have contention for disk I/O, it all falls apart.
This is known as the "noisy neighbour" problem. You might be happy and fine on your cheap VPS for months, and then the next day it collapses in a heap, even though you're getting t
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And how, exactly, do you think that data in the cloud is stored?
Limited 3D, limited scaling (Score:5, Informative)
It is excellent tech but they can't stack the cells indefinitely. The approach uses pillars of cells with no cross wiring. All the control circuitry is in one plane at the bottom. This makes it cheap because they only have to mask and etch once: all the way down to the planer circuitry on the bottom. The downside is you can only go so high before the control circuitry can no longer detect the signal from the top layers [3dincites.com] They could add another layer of control circuitry but the principle cost of making a chip is the masking and etching so it may be just as cheap (and definitely easier) to just make two chips.
Already been done (Score:5, Funny)
I think Toshiba are a bit late to the party here. I'm pretty sure Adobe's Flash has been 3D and included the ability to have many layers as you like for ages. Also, surely Toshiba can't release it's own version of Flash and give it the same name, right?
We don't need density! We need longer life! (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm tired of throwing away several Intel or Samsung SSDs every week. My last set of nine Samsung 840s that I installed in development desktops lasted less than 90 days before they wore-out. Yes, we're hard on drives, but it's ridiculous how much time our IT department is throwing away due to the fact SSD drives are considered disposable and die so quickly. They're crap. There's a reason you still see 15k spinning rust in data centers. MLC SSDs are garbage that should not be legal to be sold.
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And I work with 30-40 devs using VS and sql server and we've had less than five SSD failures in 3 years. One of us isn't telling the truth.
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There's no reason to use SLC these days really... Once you start writing in large density with intent on retaining data for some period of time, you'll be striping that data across 10-100 SSDs... The combined wear-life even with cheaper MLC drives still puts you up over 100 years for most products.
It's pretty easy to take the Drive Writes Per Day (DWPD) or PetaBytes Written (PBW) for the drives and add them all up... most any install will 10+ drives will outlast any standard 5 year hardware refresh cycle.
Di
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I recommend he quit lying about how crappy things are but that's just my opinion.
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WTH were you doing to them? I call BS.
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From what I have heard, the Samsung 840 is scandalously bad and most other types should fare better.
Well, one thing is for sure... (Score:2)
SSD $/GB is gonna be going down across the board. It's nice to see the competition heat up.
-Matt
TLC NAND = unstable? (Score:2)
Right now, I would more interested in 48-layer MLC NAND from Toshiba than 32-layer TLC NAND if I can get it for the same price.
Samsung's TLC NAND in their "840 EVO" SSDs have had problems with performance dropping significantly after a couple of months of use. Samsung issued a "fix" with a firmware update, but after a couple of months more many users of the drives experienced choppy performance. Apparently the problem would be inherent in the TLC NAND that they use.
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Well, it won't be the same price - it requires a more complex fab process - but yeah. Consumer MLC drives have proven themselves to be robust and reliable, for the most part. TLC still seems to be a bridge a little too far.
I'd like to see Tech Report re-run their endurance test with current drive models. The only "problem" is that drives are so good now that by the time the best model fails and we get the final score, none of them will be on the market any more.