Samsung SSD 850 EVO 32-Layer 3D V-NAND-Based SSD Tested 127
MojoKid writes Samsung just took the wraps off a new family of mainstream solid state drives, targeting the market segment previously occupied by its popular SSD 840 EVO series. The new Samsung SSD 850 EVO series is the follow-up to the company's current flagship SSD 850 PRO, but the new EVO is Samsung's first to pack 32layer 3D VNAND 3-bit MLC flash memory. The move to 32layer 3D VNAND 3-bit MLC flash brings pricing down to the .50 to .60 per GiB range, but doesn't adversely affect endurance because the cell structure doesn't suffer from the same inherent limitations of planar NAND, since the cells are stacked vertically with the 3D VNAND. The new 850 EVO drive performs well with large sequential transfers and also offered very low access times. The compressibility of the data being transferred across the Samsung SSD 850 EVO had no impact on performance and small file transfers at high queue depth were fast. Small file transfers with low queues depths, which is what you'd expect to see with most client workloads, were also very good. The Samsung SSD 850 EVO drives also put up excellent numbers in trace-based tests like PCMark 7.
Very cool. (Score:3)
Anytime the price and reliability of SSD improves it makes it more viable for end users and business work stations. If I had a bigger budget, every workstation would currently have an SSD.
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Just downsized to 256GB SSD, Arrgh! (Score:2)
The lease expired on my work laptop, and the new one has a 256GB SSD instead of the 320GB spinning disk the previous one had. It's not enough :-) Specifically, it's not enough to keep my ~60GB of music on, along with the actual work stuff, so that's temporarily off-loaded to an external drive, plus I had to off-load a lot more stuff for the "move almost all your stuff to the new machine" software to have working space.
And unfortunately, the IT department won't let me crack it open and add an extra spinnin
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If you keep your work stuff on the computer 256GB is not much especially if you have music on the same box.
Does your company not require you to keep your work on the network drive? I mean, god forbid you workstation dies.
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Laptop, not workstation; I'm usually not connected to a work LAN, so network drives are for backup and file exchange at best, not for data I actually use. (Email's theoretically also backed up on a server, though I'm not convinced that's reliable for anything older than a month or two.)
There's a project to get everybody to move to VMware-based Hosted Virtual Desktops, but I haven't bitten that bullet yet; it would let me access my stuff from different machines, but needs network connectivity to be usable a
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Even with that in mind, capacity is still in high demand (the guys selling SSD upgrades for MBPs seem to be doing quite well.) Any user with a clue has some sort of backup drive (be it a Mac with Time Machine, a Windows machine with TrueImage, a Linux box with amanda/zmanda, or something.) Eventually, that backup drive will fill up with changes. A smarter user will be at least changing out HDDs every so often so that if the computer and the external drive are destroyed, the data is still accessible.
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the guys selling SSDs for MBPs are doing well, but they're selling 500MB drives. the need for capacity isn't increased. Time machine is smart about which versions it keeps. It keeps hourlies for a week, dailies for a month, and weeklies after that. once the drive fills up it starts deleting the old weeklies. the demand isn't there like you think it is.
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you're surely doing some niche professional thing. why not just buy what you need and expense it?
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And most drive space owned by companies isn't used. If you're filling 80% of your drive you're starting to lose options. You're making tough choices about what data to keep. When I buy a computer I want a hard drive large enough for the great unknowns of the future. That way when a new game comes out, or I want to provide backup space to my friend, or when I want 100 GB of swap space for an unusual purpose it's there. My personal data takes
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>Sorry vendors. You can push your multi-terabyte hard drives all you want, but Moore's Law hasn't even remotely
>held true in the consumer space when it comes to storage demand.
Of course it has. I'm up to about 12TB in used storage, and I'm not anywhere near alone in this. Don't think that just because you're not using as much storage as computer users generally do now, that no one else is.
>The average consumer fills 10 - 20% of their drive capacity. Ever.
The average consumer isn't the market for hard drives. They don't even need computers since tablets and phones better suit the needs of non-technical people.
The sum total of all the special snowflakes like you who need many TB of storage pales in comparison to the Joe Schmoes who grab whatever drive is cheap and big enough. 1 TB has been "big enough" for 99.9% of people for a long time, and 1.5 and 2 TB drives only move when they're priced very close to the 1 TB versions.
Storage is fully commoditized. I bought my last hard disk drive at Costco, for shit's sake. I see them at supermarkets and drug stores.
People don't need more space to store HD video.
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WRONG.
WRONG.
WRONG.
WRONG.
If you knew what you were talking about you would know that
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I think what the GP is saying is very fair description of "the average person". The most popular camera on flickr is the iphone, and this has been true almost going back to the iphone 1. I don't know anybody who torrents movies the way people torrent audio, and I bet it's much less common. Especially since it's so easy to stream anything on mainstream sources or other options (just search bing video - they connect people with all the pirate stuff).
video editing is a prosumer activity. flickr, picasa, and th
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Bluray's aren't heavily compressed H.264. The "Digital Download" shit they pack in with every major Bluray release have bitrates that are 1/4 of the Bluray or less. Streaming bitrates are even lower. Blurays by comparison have massive, wasteful bitrates because they have to be decoded by ancient shitty players.
And no, not all Blurays are H.264, the spec also supports MPEG2 and VC-1 - many early Blurays were MPEG2. MPEG2 is nowhere near the same class as MPEG4 Part 10 - they're not "comparable" with regar
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If you knew what you were talking about...
Pot-kettle much ?
I think sexconkor is pretty spot on regarding Joe-average usage of storage and what goes on it.
I'm not saying that you are 'lying', it's just that you probably move in 'media-heavy-circles' and reality might look a bit distorted to you.
Simply address 10 people in a 'random' location that is based on something different than your choice. If you have kids, simply address some of the parents of kids in your children's class and ask them about their computer habits. You might be surprised to l
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You are basing your assumptions on current storage requirements. Applications will be developed that push those limits, even if they aren't here yet.
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I refute with one word: photography. Without even looking at the cavernous requirements of video, the size of a RAW still image is increasing exponentially now that phones are north of forty megapixels. Use any Adobe product for editing, and we're looking at PSDs the size of New England states and edit catalogs that dwarf even that.
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Most consumers are not photographers who keep every RAW image.
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My girlfriend rapidly fills her disk with RAW photos from her pro DSLR. She does not represent the 99%. She might represent the 99.9%. Still, she's not buying new storage week. She'll buy when she fills up the current disk and she'll buy 1 new disk that lasts her a while, using the existing disk as backup / overflow. She and the market segment she represents do not represent the driving force in the market. The vast majority of people simply aren't photographers.
This isn't about thinking of instances
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I've got about 8 terrabytes of video of my grandchildren alone. I think for general storage on the computer 512GB is plenty but storage of video long term goes to the big 3.5 inch drives stacked in the tower.
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And everyone other grandparent would simply be watching those videos on Youtube.
Your 8 TB of disk cost you a few hundred dollars. You don't represent a market force.
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Why would I put my grandchildren's videos on Youtube? I can't fathom why I'd even think about doing that. Storage is cheap, pennies per gigabyte. If I put them on youtube I am entirely hostage to youtube. Storage is dirt cheap and getting cheaper.
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Why would I put my grandchildren's videos on Youtube?
I don't know why you'd do it, but I think the reason many people put their videos on YouTube is because it's an easy way to share said videos with the people they want to share them with. Sending someone a YouTube URL is a lot easier and quicker than figuring out how to get a multi-gigabyte video file from your computer to their computer.
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Maybe. But once it's there it's really not yours anymore. And years down the road it may not exist at all. I've got a few videos from when my children were little. It's 30 years old and I still have it because I kept it, backed it up and protected it. I know a lot of people my age who no longer have videos from that era because they failed to back it up. I didn't put a lot of though into it but I'm glad I did it. That stuff is precious to me now and the grandchildren love looking at their parents whe
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But once it's there it's really not yours anymore. And years down the road it may not exist at all.
There's nothing that says you have to delete your original file after you've uploaded a copy of it to YouTube.
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I know I'm not typical. I bought my first computer in 1983 and I run Linux, Mac and even Windows computers. Everything from a raspberry pi to a quad i7 box. Still, enthusiasts aren't rare and spend a lot of money on hardware. I spend a lot more than Joe Schmoe with his Kindle Fire tablet. I know plenty of people that have stuffed hard drives full of data and buy external hard drives for backup and additional storage. The market for USB drives is pretty vibrant. People like to keep their stuff.
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My parents which aren't from the technology generation do record lots of video when they go on vacation and their storage requirements are above the 2TB mark.
This being said, nobody would buy SSD for long term storage. That's not what SSDs are meant for (at this current time)
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128GB is probably enough for most but doesn't really give much space for future requirements. I'd think 256GB is enough for every single user in my work place since work files are required to be on their network drive or department drive. The base install for engineers here is 90GB. Other users are probably about 40GB.
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I had a professor who would build an atom based PC and install an ssd. IO is usually why users perceive a system as slow.
It amazes me how hard it is to find a sub $500 laptop with ssd. Tablets and 2 in ones seem to have them, but nothing with a 15 inch screen. I was temped to buy a $200 laptop and throw a ssd in there. Not sure what I was going to do with the 500GB hd it comes with.
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It amazes me how hard it is to find a sub $500 laptop with ssd.
Why? For a cheap laptop, the manufacturer's choice is probably a 500GB-1TB hard drive, or a 60GB SSD, with half of that 60GB used by Window 8. Which one do you think people would rather buy?
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The one with the bigger breasts, of course.
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You wanted something sexist? Why didn't you say so in the first place! Here you go [wordpress.com]!
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Not quite 15", but the HP stream is a $230 14" laptop with a 32 GB ssd. Windows, office, and the various bundled apps take up about 15 gigs of that. I have the 12" version and speed is fine, you just can't use it for games, and if you want to keep a large collection of music or pictures (or whatever) you need an external drive or SD card.
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And since SDXC cards are available at ~ $.40/GB (up to 256GB) addon storage is competitive with 2.5" SSD's in price if not performance. It would be nice if the internal SSD was about 4x that size though so you could have more programs than the base installed, but that would add ~$40 to the price which would make it too expensive to compete with Chromebooks.
SDxC is cheap up to 64GB, expensive above (Score:2)
Where did you find cheap SDxC cards for 128-256GB? When I looked online a month or so ago (plus in Fry's today), they were reasonable up to 64GB, then expensive above that (except for no-name Chinese brands on Amazon that had reviews saying the capacities were fake.)
For USB2/USB3 flash sticks, they seem to be cheap up to 128GB, but with most laptop designs, that's going to stick out of the case, so I'd prefer SDxC cards that can stay installed, as long as I'm not using them for high-speed applications. (I
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Google SDXC nGB and you'll find plenty of ads for cheap memory, the PNY one seems to be the only reasonable one at 256GB, but there are quite a few of the usual second tier players at 128GB.
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I don't know, I have a second browser and a second office suite and some old-school games and some programming tools and some translation tools and still have like 12 gigs left. If I want to watch downloaded videos I stream them from my desktop computer. 32 GB is fine if you're not using it for modern games or to house all your media.
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Not sure what I was going to do with the 500GB hd it comes with.
Just buy an external USB enclosure for the left-over spinning disk. You can get USB3 version for under 15 bucks
Or get one of those HD bays that installs instead of DVD drive.
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The cache works better that I would have guessed. Almost as fast as a "pure" SSD for all common tasks, and cheaper/easier.
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Good solution. I do like my pure 480GB SSD in my work laptop for the battery savings. I get 6 hours out of an i5 laptop now. It's an HP Elitebook 840 if you're interested. For pure storage I have a 2TB USB3 drive that holds things like music, software packages and all the found Doctor Who episodes, just in case, ya know.
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sadly, m-sata is going away. and there are not many choices for msata drives right now, either.
m.2 is the new hotness. buying msata is probably not smart since next year's systems (and future) won't have msata.
I hate it, but this is how things are.
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Re:lowering price? (Score:5, Informative)
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According to AnandTech, they move from 20nm back up to 40nm for this tech!
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Well, with so many layers your process control must be extremely good which means a more mature process. Here's a good illustration [prohardver.hu], they're like little wells with regular gates down the sides.
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No, actually for flash it does NOT have to be extremely good. Flash memory production can handle lots of bad bits due to process errors. The controller firmware will simply map-out the bad bits, simple as that. If 1% of the flash cells are lost due to process errors, it just isn't a problem.
The same cannot be said for cpu and ram logic.
-Matt
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The question is, were they already at 1% before they started stacking 32 on top of each other, because the drive firmware sure as hell can't cover up for 32%* of the drive being screwed.
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The question is, were they already at 1% before they started stacking 32 on top of each other, because the drive firmware sure as hell can't cover up for 32%* of the drive being screwed.
If 1% of each of the 32 layers is broken, 1% of the drive is broken, not 32%.
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They're not stacking silicon wafers on top of each other. Rather, they're putting more layers of oxide, semiconductor, etc onto each wafer in order to produce the 3d stacking. Yes, it's more complex. But it's a pretty mature technology.
They're actually doing both. The 120GB drive only has a single NAND package (the PCB is tiny!) which contains 8 stacked 3D NAND dies. The NAND package has eight chip select pins, one for each die, and the controller interleaves requests to each die to achieve parallelism.
Re: Should prefix titles like these with "Ad: ..." (Score:2)
if you're here you should be able to tell the difference between reviewing the first entrant in a new product category and every subsequent device.
.50 WHAT? (Score:4, Insightful)
.50 or .60 what per GiB?
Quarts? Furlongs? Solar masses?
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Obviously, it's .50 "3-d's" per cell. Otherwise, it would be six bits. And kudos to them for going for two significant digits of accuracy.
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But flash was already that cheap, so that would hardly be a breakthrough.
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But flash was already that cheap, so that would hardly be a breakthrough.
They only have to match the current market, which is a bonus if you can do so with an effectively new technology.
Once mature, Samsung will probably be able to bang these out much cheaper. Also, any bad non-SSD grade chips will just be redirected to their SD Card devision, which will map out the bad blocks at the controller level and work with what would otherwise be waste.
The FLASH industry is very efficient, and the price will remain high (price parity with planer FLASH) until Samsung recoup their upfront
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If the price was set by Verizon [blogspot.ca], it probably means "0.50 cents" per GiB.
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As the words before that say pricing it should be assumed that they are talking about a monetary measurement. As this is a US site and this storage pricing value is typically measured in the worlds major reserve currency it would not be out of line to say it's in dollars. But yes it should be included.
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The problem is, 50-60 US cents per gig would be pretty expensive by modern flash's standards.
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I would agree, that's why they should have included the unit of measure. I had the same reaction you did, that 50cents a gig is actually quite high with average selling prices quite a bit below that right now.
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.50 or .60 what per GiB?
Quarts? Furlongs? Solar masses?
Libraries of Congress - obviously.
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.50 or .60 what per GiB?
Quarts? Furlongs? Solar masses?
This is Slashdot, so I'm hoping it's Quatloos.
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I'm more irritated by the bringing price down-part of that sentence. SSD:s are already about $0.55 per GiB and have been at that price point for several months.
I hope the $0.55 price will turn out to be more like $.40 once production is in full swing.
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Yeah, I got a similar price on a 256GB drive back in June/July.
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Blame ASCII. There is no standard (7-bit) ASCII symbol for cents. Back in my day we use to just type a c and then backspace and type a / to make the US cents symbol. Of course, back then most typewriters didn't have a numeral 1 and we just used a lower case L for that.
The lack of cent and degree symbols always bothered me when it comes to the ASCII set. Before all you internationalists get upset about including a US centric symbol, remember that the A in ASCII stands for American.
Now why the author of t
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That's .50 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it.
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Fuck that.
Why no PCI-E model?
Re:Why no 2tb model? (Score:5, Informative)
With increased density from 32 layers (despite larger feature size) why don't they have a 2tb (or 1920gb) model yet?
Anandtech [anandtech.com] wrote:
Initially I was told that the 850 EVO would come in 2TB capacity as well, but later on Samsung opted against it due to the limited demand.
Most likely because there's no savings whatsoever, if a 1TB drive is $500 then 2TB is probably like $980. They scale almost perfectly, all you need is an extra SATA port and you'd get a lot better performance with two in RAID0.
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And never mind 2TB, 3D SSDs should manage at least 10TB right?
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Technically 10TB is probably possible but if you do the math, do you really want a $4-5000 SSD in your laptop? Or let me rephrase it, you want it but would you pay the price of a cheap used car before you even get to the rest of the machine? You know you wouldn't. And to be honest, I think if you're the kind of user where 1TB is not enough then 2TB is probably also not enough. If we could see a sales breakdown I'm guessing even 1TB is rare.
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For someone who absolutely needs 10TB of zero-wait storage in a 2.5" form factor, 4-5k is not a big deal. Because pretty soon it will be $2000, then $1000, then $500.
Inexpensive enterprise SSD is having a big impact on how you spec out servers now. Do you build something with a bunch of 15k RPM drives in a RAID 0+1 array, short-stroked and end up with about 1TB of useful space? Or do you simply put 2x1
And a 5 year warranty (Score:5, Interesting)
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If you want fast computer, get at least 16GB RAM. Turn OFF swap. Enjoy.
Until you run out of RAM and start losing data. :-)
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In my experience, RAM is usually the second thing that causes slowdowns.
The first are either obvious malware, or the countless junkware programs that add ghost loopback VPNs for adding ads in transit, browser add-ons, random crap that sits in memory and phones home to Bog-knows-what, "virus" scanning utilities which pop up and say there is a major infection, and the only way it can be fixed is via a credit card, and so on. The best way to fix this is to back up the box via an image, dump all documents, com
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Hi! I see you're trying to write in English! (Score:1)
(Clippy pops up)
Hi, I see you're trying to write in English!
Can I help?
Did you mean to say "I'm trying to sell Samsung tech and want you not to realize this is a PR puff piece"?
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Or as gamergate would call it, "Ethical journalism."
Why is 3D NAND better? (Score:5, Informative)
TFA says:
The move to 32-layer 3D VNAND 3-bit MLC flash brings pricing down to the .50 to .60 per GiB range, but doesn't adversely affect endurance because the cell structure doesn't suffer from the same inherent limitations of planar NAND, since the cells are stacked vertically with the 3D VNAND.
which didn't make sense to me. Luckily Anandtech [anandtech.com] has a non-gibberish explanation:
Rather than increasing density by shrinking cell size, Samsung's V-NAND takes a few steps back in process technology and instead stacks multiple layers of NAND cells on top of one another. ...In the floating gate MOSFET, electrons are stored on the gate itself - a conductor. Defects in the transistor (e.g. from repeated writes) can cause a short between the gate and channel, depleting any stored charge in the gate. If the gate is no longer able to reliably store a charge, then the cell is bad and can no longer be written to. Ultimately this is what happens when you wear out an SSD.
With V-NAND, Samsung abandons the floating gate MOSFET and instead turns to its own Charge Trap Flash (CTF) design. An individual cell looks quite similar, but charge is stored on an insulating layer instead of a conductor. This seemingly small change comes with a bunch of benefits, including higher endurance and a reduction in overall cell size. That's just part of the story though.
V-NAND takes this CTF architecture, and reorganizes it into a non-planar design. The insulator surrounds the channel, and the control gate surrounds it. The 3D/non-planar design increases the physical area that can hold a charge, which in turn improves performance and endurance.
The final piece of the V-NAND puzzle is to stack multiple layers of these 3D CTF NAND cells. Since Samsung is building density vertically, there's not as much pressure to shrink transistor sizes. With relaxed planar space constraints, Samsung turned to an older manufacturing process (30nm class, so somewhere between 30 and 39nm) as the basis of V-NAND.
By going with an older process, Samsung inherently benefits from higher endurance and interference between cells is less of an issue. Combine those benefits with the inherent endurance advantages of CTF and you end up with a very reliable solution. Whereas present day 19/20nm 2-bit-per-cell MLC NAND is good for around 3000 program/erase cycles, Samsung's 30nm-class V-NAND could withstand over 10x that (35K p/e cycles).
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