Intel 335 Series SSD Equipped With 20-nm NAND

crookedvulture writes "The next generation of NAND has arrived. Intel's latest 335 Series SSD sports 20-nm flash chips that are 29% smaller than the previous, 25-nm generation. The NAND features a new planar cell structure with a floating, high-k/metal gate stack, a first for the flash industry. This cell structure purportedly helps the 20-nm NAND overcome cell-to-cell interference, allowing it to offer the same performance and reliability characteristics of the 25-nm stuff. The performance numbers back up that assertion, with the 335 Series matching other drives based on the same SandForce controller silicon. The 335 Series may end up costing less than the competition, though; Intel has set the suggested retail price at an aggressive $184 for the 240GB drive, which works out to just 77 cents per gigabyte."

Comments

Interesting...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm a bit surprised that Intel seems to have abandoned doing their controllers in-house(which they did for some of their early entries in the SSD market, back when there was some...um... extremely variable quality available. *cough* JMicron *cough*). Does SandForce have some juicy patents that make it impossible for Intel to economically match/exceed them even with superior process muscle? Has building competent flash controller chips now been commodified enough that Intel doesn't want to waste their time? Did some Intel project go sour and force them to go 3rd party?

Re:Interesting...

[rsmith-mac]

It's pretty much all of the above. On the Intel side of things, making their own controllers just wasn't panning out. There are rumors that they had some problems with what was supposed to follow their existing in-house controller, but there's also a lot of evidence that the benefits of building their own controller wasn't worth the cost. The controller itself is very low margin, and Intel is looking for high-margin areas.

Meanwhile SandForce has some extremely desirable technology. Data de-dupe and compression not only improve drive performance right now, but they're going to be critical in future drives as NAND cells shrink in size and the number of P/E cycles drops accordingly. Intel likely could have developed this in-house, but why do so? They can just buy the controller from SandForce at a sweet price, roll their own firmware (that's where all the real work happens anyhow), and sell the resulting SSD as they please.

Re:Interesting...

[PipsqueakOnAP133]

I actually asked a person who worked in Intel's storage research about this.

It boiled down to this: Intel Research made the X25, and pushed it over to Intel's product teams who basically just put them in boxes and shipped it. And people loved it.

Then Intel's product design teams tried to design a follow on controller and sucked entirely at it. So they got the research group to rev the x25 a few times, while they contracted with Marvell for controllers since they needed a SATA 6G controller for their own firmware.

At that time, they hadn't switched to Sandforce, but judging by the fact that Sandforce has been quite dominant even back then, I wouldn't be surprised if Intel did almost no firmware customization now.

I wouldn't have believed that Intel had sucked in SSD controller design had I not heard it from a Intel researcher (although they might have been biased given that the story make their peers look good) but looking back again, we're talking about the company that brought us Netburst and FBDIMMs.

so this fixes smaller cell = less reliability?

[SuperBanana]

Last I heard, failure rate was directly tied to process size. Does any of this fix that?

Also: Sandforce controller? Way to go, Intel - Sandforce is a bucket of fail:

https://www.google.com/search?q=sandforce+freeze

and:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SandForce#Issues

and more...

Rock solid? Yeah right...

[Anonymous Coward]

My experience with Sandforce based Intel SSD's was rubbish. Bought a SSD 330 120GB, constant freezing. Sent it back, got a replacement - still freezing. The seller gave me a free 'upgrade' to a SSD 520 120GB as an apology for the trouble. Guess what? Still freezing all the time. Got a refund, went and bought a Samsung SSD 830 128GB (based on Samsung's own controller), and is as solid as a rock - might not be as speedy, but it was £20 less and actually *works*.

Re:Excellent deal on the price point

[hairyfeet]

The problem is gonna be, as this article notes the chips get a LOT worse with each shrink with more failures and more trouble with throughput. As their tests show single does best, triple cell does worst, but of course we all knew that and what we are seeing on the market is mostly MLC.

I have a feeling SSDs are gonna be a "stop gap" on our way to something like the PRAM that HP is working on, but until it gets here the keyword with SSDs is gonna be backup, backup backup backup. We know that is smart to do anyway, but you'd be surprised how many normal folks will think the SSDs are no different than the HDDs and just trust it and find out the hard way you get NO warning with SSDs. This article may be a little old but its still true, with SSDs its a hot/crazy scale with hot speeds and crazy failure rates.