Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Data Storage Intel Technology

Micron and Intel Announce 3D NAND Flash Co-Development To Push SSDs Past 10TB 93

MojoKid writes Both Micron and Intel noted in a release today that traditional planar NAND flash memory is reaching a dead-end, and as such, have been working together on 3D memory technology that could open the floodgates for high densities and faster speeds. Not all 3D memory is alike, however. This joint development effort resulted in a "floating gate cell" being used, something not uncommon for standard flash, but a first for 3D. Ultimately, this 3D NAND is composed of flash cells stacked 32 high, resulting in 256Gb MLC and 384Gb TLC die that fit inside of a standard package. That gives us 48GB per die, and up to 750GB in a single package. Other benefits include faster performance, reduced cost, and technologies that help extend the life of the memory.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Micron and Intel Announce 3D NAND Flash Co-Development To Push SSDs Past 10TB

Comments Filter:
  • A monkey could configure a 10TB array right now and power isn't exactly a problem. Putting it in a single drive is neat but the #1 problem with SSDs right now is price. The prices are horribly inconsistent day to day. They can make a 2Tb or 10Tb or 10000TB drive for all I care but what I need for my many, many custom builds at my shop is a low cost 240-256GB SSD.
    Once in a while I can get a $90 silicon power S60 240GB SSD. Crucial's MX and BX series hit that low once in a while. All others are perpetua
    • All others are perpetually above $100 which is too expensive for a Facebook wonder do-nothing PC with a pentium 4th edition and 4GB of RAM.

      Why use an SSD in such a do-nothing PC? If you can't go with a regular HD try a hybrid SSD-HD. Last I looked a hybrid with 1 TB HD and 8 GB SSD was under $80.

      • by mlts ( 1038732 )

        Had a similar choice when giving a laptop to a relative. I went SSD instead of SSHD because SSDs are physically more resistant to shock.

        However, if given the choice with a desktop... I'd probably still use SSD, just because when I delete a file and fstrim the drive, the file is -gone- for good, since the drive controller will come around, write "1"s to all the pages that file used and call it done. Of course, keeping good backups when using SSDs is wise, just due to this exact thing.

      • by RobinH ( 124750 ) on Thursday March 26, 2015 @07:51PM (#49351003) Homepage
        I have upgraded 4 computers from HDD to SSD's since Christmas. They were all from 2 to 5 years old, and all of them run like they're a brand new computer. They boot amazingly fast, and they launch programs really fast. Compiling is much, much better too. I wouldn't ever go back to a rotating hard drive for anything other than long term archival storage now. Maybe I'd do a hybrid drive, but really around $100 or so for 240GB is a really nice sweet spot at the moment.
    • For a do-nothing pc you should be using any of the hundred sub-$60 128GB ssds.

  • Tipping point? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by BenJeremy ( 181303 ) on Thursday March 26, 2015 @04:57PM (#49349889)

    Hopefully this also sees a reduction in the cost of SSDs to bring them closer in line with platter drives, which have only just started dropping into the $30/TB range once more (since the Thai floods gave manufacturers their own Sumitomo excuse to drive up prices).

    If the market had progressed more realistically, platter drives would be $15/TB and we'd already have consumer-level 10TB drives, but Seagate and Western Digital took a breathing period to reap profits, allowing SSD technology to start playing catch-up. ...not that SSD makers are off the hook... they've gone to smaller fab processes that shortened the life of NANDs and also have kept prices from falling at a reasonable rate, too.

    I think we are two or three breakthroughs from reaching parity on cost per byte for platter and solid state tech, at which point, platter technology will likely become a very small niche market.

    • by mlts ( 1038732 )

      Platter technology will end up being pushed to the NAS/SAN, which is why WD is making their red line of drives.

      Perhaps HDDs, now that speed and capacity are secondary, they will start evolving down the path of reliability, perhaps replacing tape as an archival medium.

      NAS drives are going to be a big market, especially with devices like Apple's new MacBook with limited expansion capability, so people will use WiFi Direct hard drives as their main backup source, as opposed to USB drives. In this use, capacit

      • by swb ( 14022 )

        I think major leaps of density will eliminate platters. Why bother with them at all with their ridiculously slow seek times, heat, power consumption? At high capacities they're more of a risk to data integrity due to slow array rebuild times and it takes dozens of them to equal the IOPS of flash. Even now platters are either useful for their high density as Tier 3 in a SAN or in large numbers to get IOPS.

        If there was a huge leap in flash densities I think they would get cheap enough that no one would bot

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Chip fabrication tech and flash density is increasing at a rate far faster than spinning platter storage. At mass market scales, SSDs are going to win pretty soon because of simple BoM cost.

      Hard drives require a lot precision machining and assembly. Chip fabrication and PCB assembly scales much better, and is much cheaper. It's the same pick-and-place followed by oven reflow that /everything/ else uses.

      Flash storage is going to win by size, logistics, power usage, and mechanical requirements. Why devote spa

      • by Anonymous Coward

        A tiny board with 2-3 chips. Most of the inside of that 2.5" drive chassis is empty air.

        That's because of the mSATA format. You can already buy a 1 TB [amazon.com] mSATA drive. On raw size alone you can fit 7.1 of those into the same space as a 3.5" hard drive. [wolframalpha.com]

        They just need to get the cost down. Storage solutions in the future will be trays of those chips in a 1U-4U form factor with fans in front and some CPU and networking connections. No more 'hot swap' hard drive 3.5" form factors, just swap an entire blade of SSD chips.

      • Hard drives require a lot precision machining and assembly. Chip fabrication and PCB assembly scales much better, and is much cheaper. It's the same pick-and-place followed by oven reflow that /everything/ else uses.

        Good point.

    • Where is cheaper and greater ram? We should be seeing 128 gb ram by now and ram drives and caches for faster performance

      • 64GB and 128GB ram is already available. You just don't see them at the consumer levels as their is no need or demand for them. a consumer benefits more from persistent storage, the advantages of ram drives is really non existent for all but a very small niche of users. Server side we have had this for a long time. The two servers I am currently playing with have 4TB of ram.

  • by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Thursday March 26, 2015 @05:52PM (#49350277)

    At this rate I'll finally be able to have my entire music collection on an iPod without having to compress my music in that terrible FLAC format. FLAC is a "lossless" format but you can totally hear which bits have been squished into the file for too long! That's why I decompressed all my files and let them sit for a week, so that the bits can breathe.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    More layers of NAND will just multiply the already steep cost. With process shrinks and MLC, flash endurance is falling sharply, and the bits literally leak out over time. In addition to being physically unreliable, the complex software stack required to transform block-erasable flash into useable storage does not inspire confidence, especially when virtually no drives guarantee data integrity with loss of power.

    Far more interesting would be solid state storage based on memristors or phase-change memory.

    • Good old reliable tape. None of this fancy random access hard disk garbage that fails all the time, or complicated wear leveling flash nonsense.

      Maybe something like core memory [wikipedia.org] or bubble memory [wikipedia.org] if I need some random access behavior.

      I hear it's down to a penny per bit, only around 1200 megabucks for 10 gigabytes of Core memory.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Tape is reliable, and core memory (in its modern incarnation as MRAM) provides immensely superior reliability and read/write performance. Unlike NAND flash, it offers true random access at a byte level granularity. NAND flash has its place, but it is the CD-RW of solid state storage technologies.

        NAND flash uses a pile of emulation software to fake hard disk semantics, and it degrades reliability and performance. Anything less than a quality enterprise SSD with capacitor has no chance of implementing such

    • by Yunzil ( 181064 )

      With process shrinks and MLC, flash endurance is falling sharply, and the bits literally leak out over time.

      Uh, that's kinda the point of 3D. Instead of shrinking the cells, just stack them up. It's what Samsung did with their 850 Pros, which have a 10-year warranty. Besides, the TechReport torture test shows that reliability really isn't a problem for consumer-level devices.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    they are optimizing the design to be 3D printed in my living room? I'm already 3D printing my house, and the car in the garage, it would be nice if we could 3D print a complete house including the laptop in one pass?

Your own mileage may vary.

Working...