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Data Storage IT Technology

SSDs Are Primed To Get Bigger and Faster With Micron's New NAND Memory Tech (pcworld.com) 48

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Micron has announced it's shipping 176-layer TLC NAND flash memory to customers, a move that portends larger, faster and even cheaper SSD drives for all. From a report: The company said its 5th-gen 3D NAND memory should put its density about 40 percent higher than its nearest competitors, which are using 128-layer NAND. Micron said read and write latencies are reduced by 35 percent compared to its 96-layer NAND, and by 25 percent compared its 128-layer NAND. Micron isn't the only NAND memory manufacturer that has 176 layers, but it is the first to start volume shipments. The Micron NAND is TLC, or three-bits per cell, and is said to have 33 percent faster transfer rates, as well as a 35 percent improvement in read and write latencies. And because it's TLC NAND instead of QLC, the new memory should offer better drive endurance, too. The 176-layer design comes from stacking two 88-layer stacks together, which isn't a new thing for Micron. You might think that's a trick, but the end result is still the same: far better density for larger drives. Micron said the new 176-layer NAND is about as thick as one-fifth of a sheet of printer paper, and works out to be as thick its previous 64-layer NAND despite having more than twice as many layers. In the end, this will lead to larger SSDs and potentially cheaper ones, too.
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SSDs Are Primed To Get Bigger and Faster With Micron's New NAND Memory Tech More

SSDs Are Primed To Get Bigger and Faster With Micron's New NAND Memory Tech

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  • Good (Score:3)

    by war4peace ( 1628283 ) on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @04:14PM (#60708932)

    SSDs are well on their way to replace HDDs save for large size, and if this brings them one step closer, I can only salute this advancement.

    • HDDs will eventually go the way of magnetic tape storage. I can't imagine any regular consumer will be buying an HDD in 10 years.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • with the new phone cameras I've seen going over 100mp? Yeah a 500Gb-1Tb SSD just ain't gonna cut it pal.

          Over 100mp on a phone, where the lens doesn't justify even 10mp? Anyone who turns that shit on deserves to see the lens distortions... and they will.

          • You're vastly overestimating the clue and eyesight of somebody who willingly buys a 100MP phone. (By the way, 100mp means 100 milli-p, which a even phone will be quite capable of doing. So regarding the kettle, dear Mr. pot.)

            Also, the sad fact is, that we mostly don't have a choice. I'd love to buy a $150 phone with a replaceable battery, modern SoC and a screen DPI value closer to my eyesight too... Oh, well, at least any phone camera and app I've come across could be configured for a lower resolution.

            • I'd love to buy a $150 phone with a replaceable battery, modern SoC and a screen DPI value closer to my eyesight too...

              Check out the Pine Phone [pine64.org].
              The shop has [pine64.com] a 2GiB RAM / 16GB eMMC flash that fits your envelope and a 3GB RAM / 32GB flash + a micro USB monitor dock for ~200$.
              It runs full-blown GNU/Linux of your choosing on vanilla upstream kernel for extra points.

              Not every single smartphone costs 1500$ just because it has a fruit on it.
              Or is a cheap 100$ thing whose noname Asian manufacturing company will disappear before you've even opened the box.

        • In 10 years? I can almost guarantee you'll get that 4tb SSD for $89. Think about where SSDs were 10 years ago.

          • Comment removed based on user account deletion

            • We are WAYYY past the point of diminishing returns on things like camera resolution. File sizes may get a bit bigger, but eventually they stop. Your music files aren't any bigger than they were 10 years ago, for example.

              My phone currently has every photo and video I've taken in the last 5 years on it. Total file size is around 150gigs. There will be a few super users who are doing things like archiving 8k video in 10 years who will be buying massive drives, but the vast majority of regular consumers will fi

    • SSDs are well on their way to replace HDDs save for large size, and if this brings them one step closer, I can only salute this advancement.

      Not just small size any more.

      This week I saw a 1Tb, brand-name* drive for $100. That's a major milestone ... but it didn't even register as newsworthy here.

      (*) Western Digital Green

      • Not just small size any more.

        This week I saw a 1Tb, brand-name* drive for $100. That's a major milestone ... but it didn't even register as newsworthy here.

        Probably because I bought a 1TB no-name SSD for $77 from NewEgg back in September. We crossed the $100 per TB mark quite a while ago. Works fine, performs as expected, ~530 megabits per second sustained throughput. It's one device in a ZFS RAIDZ1 vdev in a NAS serving an average 1.1 megabytes per second since then. Still behaving fine. We'll see how it ages. It can't be worse than the piece of shit Western Digital spinning rust I bought in January of last year that has already failed.

      • Sure, but I can buy an 18TB SATA HDD for about $500, so SSDs still have a way to go. And, the enterprise-grade SSDs are still significantly more expensive than $0.10/GB, so... we have a ways to go before they replace HDD for certain applications (bulk video storage, home/small business backup, etc.).

        Once you get to the enterprise level, SSD wins for nearly all use cases except really really big storage that doesn't get accessed much. When each appliance needs to store > 1PB, and you need a few dozen of

        • Exactly. I have 36 TB of storage in my NAS and that's four devices. And I paid less than 800 bucks for all of them combined.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      I hope the prices will match and then cheaper than HDDs.

  • OK great but can we work on reliability? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by slaker ( 53818 ) on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @04:19PM (#60708948)

    The newer and faster NAND types are all well and good for speed and capacity. Lovely. Can we go back to improving cell lifespan somehow? I probably not the only person who can wear out a TLC drive in a couple years of typical (for me) use. Are there any non-Enterprise products still shipping with high-endurance MLC?

    • Re:OK great but can we work on reliability? (Score:5, Informative)

      by godel_56 ( 1287256 ) on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @04:53PM (#60709096)

      And remember that you can't use them for any kind of archival storage. After a couple of years without being plugged in the charges in the storage cells will have started to leak out, whereas a 20 year old HDD will probably still be readable if it's been kept in good conditions.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      The newer and faster NAND types are all well and good for speed and capacity. Lovely. Can we go back to improving cell lifespan somehow? I probably not the only person who can wear out a TLC drive in a couple years of typical (for me) use. Are there any non-Enterprise products still shipping with high-endurance MLC?

      Samsung Pro still uses MLC.

      Though I admit I haven't seen a use that wears out a SSD after two years as that implies petabytes of writing a year.

      The only time I can see two years is if you buy rea

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by slaker ( 53818 )

        The 980 Pros are TLC and I suspect that will be normal going forward.

        I've been using SSDs as part of a continuous backup system for my personal workstation and production servers. I can't justify the cost of enterprise drives for the size of my operation and I've found that Samsung calls my level of use too extreme to replace under warranty. The criticism of TLC as too delicate is entirely reasonable though, and killing a QLC drive with wear will be within the bounds of normality for any gamer with a fondne

        • Wat? Unless it's a 256 or 512 drive it is impossible to kill a QLC drive in under 6 years through normal use as gamer. And even the 512 is pushing it. You would need to be installing ~8 AAA games every two weeks in order to kill it in under 6 years.

      • Samsung qualifies it's MLC with "3-bit" which translates to TLC, which is technically accurate, but misleading.

    • The newer and faster NAND types are all well and good for speed and capacity. Lovely. Can we go back to improving cell lifespan somehow? I probably not the only person who can wear out a TLC drive in a couple years of typical (for me) use. Are there any non-Enterprise products still shipping with high-endurance MLC?

      That's what over-provisioning is for. Leave 5%-10% of the disk unpartitioned and it will fix itself as it wears out.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by slaker ( 53818 )

        Every new generation is an order of magnitude less reliable than the one before. SLC was 10x what MLC which was 10x what TLC was. That 5% isn't worth a shit if you're hitting 40% wear on a drive in 12 months.

        • While SSDs may still be unsuitable for some write-heavy workflows, you know who you are if you have a workflow like that, and you're already buying special equipment anyway, so you should get what makes sense.

          For everyone else, write-heavy workflows are far less common. Reading is the norm for most people. I'm an atypical user in that I actually do have some write-heavy work, but the biggest thing I do is rip our blu-rays and DVDs for use in Plex. On an evening when I'm incredibly productive, I might be abl

          • Frankly, wear stopped mattering to most people years ago, so unless you're going to cite a particular use case where it falls down flat, it's long past time to let it go already.

            Yep, most drives can be completely rewritten a couple of times per day and still be under warranty.

            Decent drives also come with wear-monitoring utilities so you can keep track of what's going on under the hood. It should never catch you by surprise.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Some perspective: A 500GB Samsung 970 Pro NVMe SSD has a write endurance of 600 TBW with 5 year warranty. That means for each day for five years, you could write 164GB. Or, 5.7 MB/s for 8 hours each day. That's the same as 1.9 MB/s in 24 hours. So for 5 years, you could write non-stop 24/7 365 x 5 for 1.9 MB/s. THAT is endurance!!

        The trouble is the wear-leveling built into those things doesn't level across all cells evenly so those raw estimates are severely over-optimistic. Or at all, in some Samsungs. I have a Samsung 840 Pro 256 GB sitting here that failed in less than 4 years. It went totally inaccessible to the host system, too, rather than just going read-only. Early Samsung controllers were abysmal. Early Crucial controllers were bad, but at least the data was salvageable. (Early Samsung in this case being August 2013.

        • The trouble is the wear-leveling built into those things doesn't level across all cells evenly so those raw estimates are severely over-optimistic

          Wow, that's the entire point of wear-leveling. If it doesn't wear evenly, it's simply not working, period.

          My 10 year old Intel 250GB SSD is still humming along perfectly. I'd hope that an SSD drive you buy today will have figured out this most basic and crucial function.

      • I have a customer with a 2 year old Dell server built with their cheapest "SATA read-intensive" 900 GB SSDs which also hosted, for a year, their video surveillance system (~3 TB of storage, but only a max 15 day retention, so a lot of activity).

        I just checked, and the write endurance of those SSDs is at 98%. At this pace, the entire server will be obsolete well before the SSD write endurance drops below 90%. I think at best these are like Samsung Pro-type drives, they were definitely the cheapest SSDs I c

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by G00F ( 241765 )

      I've had a much higher percentage of SSD's, including intel, die that I have the spinning disks.

      granted my ssd sample size is much smaller than my HD, but I have had 3 dead SSD's, and I maybe had 4 HD's die (in over 30 years, and over 100 HD's, many still working to this day) so 4% vs 50%.

      one was ~6 year old Intel 320. The other two where newer but more than 1 year A-data, the last was either samsung or crucial.

    • Are there *any* products still shipping with MLC? Pretty much everything has gone to TLC or QLC, with appropriate amounts of over-provisioning for the intended workload/lifespan. A 6.4TB write-intensive enterprise SSD may have 15TB or more of actual NAND in it, for example. Certain vendors (Micron among them) allow the customer to adjust the amount of OP after receiving the drive, to fit the intended workload. Others aren't quite as transparent about the amount of OP, and don't allow it to be adjusted.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Pretty amazing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ixneme ( 1838374 ) on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @04:38PM (#60709006)
    I know storage is not usually the sexiest part of computing, but I must say we've been pretty spoiled by progress in the past 20 years. I spent most of the 90s trying to decide what to delete or archive to CDs. Upgrading from the old spinners to an M.2 boot/SSD storage drives was one of the best improvements to computing I've experienced since dedicated graphics cards came on the scene, and I can't remember the last time I've had to even think about how much space I have available.

    I don't really have a point, just nice to appreciate when technology exceeds expectations. If only we could have made the same sort of progress with batteries.
    • Same, bought a PCIe carrier card for an NVMe SSD on my current Sandy Bridge machine. It's really starting to show its age, compared to current CPU offerings, but the very fast SSD and GTX 1080 allow it to remain pretty competent. Now at a place where I need to make a plan to get my data off of a bunch of WD Black 2TB drives (now pushing 8 years old, probably 90% duty cycle, and not one bad sector... fingers crossed)... SSDs are now a realistic option, the other major consideration being the construction of

    • I wouldn't call it spoiled, with how much disk read/write speed has not kept up with disk size and computer speed.

      BTW, why has nobody build a vertical massively-parallel HDD yet? 8192 tiny disks with their own heads, on 8 high and thin spindles, and all lying on the side, inside a normal HDD form factor. Sure, the heads would cost more, and the controller marginally more, but the speeds would be insane!

  • I still cannot get over the size of storage whether it be data it holds or the drive itself. I remember the first harddrive I purchased was a 20 meg drive that cost almost 300 bucks and it was huge compared to ssd drives and even regular harddrives today.

  • 2? (Score:2)

    by robi5 ( 1261542 )

    Why not stack 4 layers of 88? Also, why 88 and not 64 or 128 or, say, 79?

    • N a z i s ? ;-)

      (88 = 8th letter in the alphabet = HH = "Heil Hitler". See also: 18. And 81 ("Hells Angels").)

      _ _ _ _
      (Slashdot blocks the word "N a z i"... Cause that really fucking works, and as a German I totally don't have legitimate reasons for mentioning them... --.--)

  • meh - too bad they've become obnoxious (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tiqui ( 1024021 ) on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @06:11PM (#60709474)

    Micron is just too foul to work with these days.

    There was a time when Micron was a great company - I personally designed their parts into a whole bunch of products. When you needed data on their parts, it was readily available; the company, their reps, and the distributors were all helpful and datasheets/databooks (and even sample parts) were easy to obtain.

    Now, if you are a US company (cannot say what the experience is for non-US customers) they are not interested in communicating with you and they refuse to provide data on their parts. If you go to their website, they have no complete data for many devices and require you to create an account and provide them with data on your proposed product, how you'll use the parts, etc before they'll even talk to you (and no info on if they will let you have data). There's something repugnant about a company that requires would-be customers to apply and get approved before being able to file a request to be considered for access to product data - who in the hell wants that sort of hassle when all other companies freely hand-out the same data for their parts. Most companies doing anything proprietary (ie not doing generic DIMMs) are not going to hand out such product data and sales projections etc to a SUPPLIER (which is what Micron is - they seem to have forgotten that is what they are). American companies are currently having to use Chinese parts these days because American vendor Micron will not provide data on its parts. This same company will no-doubt complain to congress at some future point about unfair trade practices - if and when that happens, they should be refused help. Micron has gone ugly.

    I'm personally unwilling to design ANYTHING from Micron into any product these days, and none of the other engineers I know are either; we've all been turned off by their bad behavior. Our assumption is that they only want to serve the generic DIMM and SSD markets. The only press release they need to put out is one apologizing to their customers and former customers, and a promise to return to good behavior as a SUPPLIER.

  • Rotating machinery will never be replaced for this purpose!
    C.f. https://twitter.com/atomicthum... [twitter.com]

  • It's neat to read about companies announcing breakthroughs, or major advancements, but over the years I've become jaded, and am now less impressed than otherwise if no solid dates for deployment come with the announcements. Granted, "shipping" doesn't equate to "I can purchase the new tech at Best Buy", I'm looking at you, nVidia's RTX 3080, but it's worlds better than "real soon". lol ;) "Lord John Whorfin: Where are we going? The Red Lectroids: Planet Ten! Lord John Whorfin: When? The Red Lectroids:

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