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Toshiba Announces 3D Flash With 48 Layers

Posted by Soulskill on from the going-to-need-an-elevator dept.

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.

42 comments

  1. Flash With 48 Layers by Anonymous Coward · · 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

  2. Spinning Rust will never be toppled by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'm sure by the time flash hits the 10TB mark, WD will have moved on to 100TB hydrogen-filled 20 platter proto-quantum-plasma-shingled recording.

    1. Re:Spinning Rust will never be toppled by garyisabusyguy · · Score: 1

      Isn't this a duplicate from yesterday?
      http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...

      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?

      --
      Wherever You Go, There You Are
  3. 3D flash ... by Obfuscant · · Score: 4, Funny

    But you have to wear goofy looking glasses to use it.

    1. Re:3D flash ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And it puts Taco Bell's seven layers to shame.

  4. The butting edge by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 2

    Man, porn is driving the craziest shit.

    --
    (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
    1. Re:The butting edge by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's "mechanical DISC", not "disk", "disk" is short for "diskette", as in "floppy diskette".

      Secondly, what you want isn't what everybody else wants. You might want to look into that.

    2. Re:The butting edge by goarilla · · Score: 1

      A DVR works better with a mechanical disk anyway with a fixed bit rate in a continuous motion access.

      Huh, but SSD's are also a lot faster on sequential reads than mechanical disks.

    3. Re:The butting edge by Kjella · · Score: 1

      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 hard drives work just fine. Everything else you can put on an SSD. So the incentive to invest is really, really low.

      I guess same reason we should be seeing 128 gig ram machines but are not. Simply there is no market but it could easily be done today

      Yes, I looked building an 8x8GB rig back in end of 2012 when the RAM market tanked but couldn't really find any reason to. In fact the 4x4GB RAM from 2011 is pretty much the only component I kept when I upgraded last year. By the way, for $2-3k you can now get an X99 mobo, Xeon E5-2603 and 8x16GB DDR4 Reg/ECC RAM but unless it's all about the RAM performance will be very anemic. But I haven't even found the incentive to bump it up to 32GB yet, which I could do any time. It doesn't exactly help that prices have more than doubled the last 2-3 years.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    4. Re:The butting edge by hairyfeet · · Score: 1

      You brought up the Steam hardware survey? You might want to look at the sizes of the latest game releases. 35GB isn't even surprising anymore, and several 50GB+ games have already been released and even on a fast connection a game that size? Gonna take awhile to download so unless you wanna have to wait hours just to play a game drives will only be going up.

      That doesn't even count those that are recording pictures and videos, HD adds up ya know, and those ripping their DVD or BD collections gonna need space, hell lots of reasons for having more space and even a lot of the new laptops are sporting 750GB-1TB drives so I really don't see many being happy with only having 250GB or less, SSD or not.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    5. Re:The butting edge by itzly · · Score: 1

      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.

    6. Re:The butting edge by SQL+Error · · Score: 1

      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 the same allocation of resources you always have. It takes a lot of complex engineering and expert management to keep noisy neighbours at bay.

      SSDs eliminate this, because SSD performance on multi-threaded random I/O is not far short of even their best-case sequential performance. Which means that every cloud provider wants to move to pure SSD. Exabytes worth of it. I work for a relatively small company, and we have 1.5PB of disk that we'd love to convert to SSD.

      That SSD needs to be dense and reliable. Smaller process nodes improved density at a cost of write cycles. 3D flash gives us improved density and increased write cycles at a cost of more complex fabrication.

      The market is there, all right.

    7. Re:The butting edge by Chandon+Seldon · · Score: 1

      But most of that is on the cloud anyway.

      And how, exactly, do you think that data in the cloud is stored?

      --
      -- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
    8. Re:The butting edge by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      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 :-)

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
    9. Re:The butting edge by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      God hate android auto correct. Gigs and people not poplease and gifts ... on phone

    10. Re:The butting edge by hairyfeet · · Score: 1

      Bigot much? I listed several use cases that didn't have a thing to do with gaming, or do you think those taking pictures and home movies are pirates too?

      And since we are jumping on the asshole train if VM users made even 5% of the population I'd be fucking amazed, it is YOU sir who are the extreme niche case which doesn't register as there are a hell of a lot more gamers (a market that has made more than Hollywood 15 years in a row) than VM users...hell probably a lot more warez hoarders than VM users.

      Finally way to miss the point...WHOOSH...if you ONLY download the game when you are ready to play? You gonna be sitting there with your dick in your hand for at least a few hours every time you want to play...who wants that? I'm currently playing around 20GB worth of games...have 300GB worth installed...why? Because if I feel like a stealth game I do NOT want to play a stealth game in 3 hours, I want to play it NOW, same with FPS, same with sandbox or RTS, I don't want to wait, sometimes til the next day, when I could just "click game, start playing" and with 1TB going for $40, 2TB going for less than $60, why shouldn't I just have the games ready? I have 3TB installed and even with a pile of games and vids and music I still have over 800GB free so I don't have to give a single fuck about game size, if I wants it I gets it, period. Its a shame Steam doesn't do a hardware survey about install habits as I bet I'm faaar from alone!

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    11. Re:The butting edge by Addicted+To+FM · · Score: 1

      ^ THIS I come from a large family. I'm the only person in my family who knows how to encode video formats into video DVDs. I get weddings, graduations, reunions, sports events etc and I convert it to DVD for them. I need tons of space to keep that stuff around in case someone loses their copy. Hell, my youngest daughter's kindergarten teacher is married to a professional photographer. He does the usual stuff (weddings, etc) but he also goes to every local sporting event he can, takes as many pictures as he can and tries to sell them to the local newspaper. Now I know someone is going to say "So? He can delete the sporting event pictures if the paper isn't interested." But he can't... sometimes the local paper doesn't want to buy them until much later. As an example, a local teenager, who was well known around town for being good at sports, passed away in a car accident about a year ago. The newspaper wanted to do a big collage of various pictures of him and went to this photographer because they knew he never threw pictures away. The guy has TB upon TB of RAIDed storage and just keeps adding to it. Not everyone who needs large quantities of storage is a pirate. You and I both know that but it's sad how many others just don't get it.

  5. Limited 3D, limited scaling by erice · · Score: 4, 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 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.

    1. Re:Limited 3D, limited scaling by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      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.

      We already have a situation like that where you can use last gen memory or power transistors and just get two of them instead of one at a cheaper price.
      Sometimes you use that option, sometimes size constraints doesn't allow you to.

      With the Raspberry around and with all video cameras out there I can imagine that we already have a market that are willing to pay a bit more as long as you can squeeze more into an SD card.
      Same deal with cell phones. Reducing the area could be worth the extra cost. Being able to cut off a mm or two is probably enough of a sales argument to motivate the extra cost.

  6. Already been done by Anonymous Coward · · 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?

  7. We don't need density! We need longer life! by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

  8. Re:We don't need density! We need longer life! by Bengie · · Score: 1

    So you're writing about 10TB/day for 90 days strait? That's impressive.

  9. Well, one thing is for sure... by m.dillon · · Score: 1

    SSD $/GB is gonna be going down across the board. It's nice to see the competition heat up.

    -Matt

  10. Re:we need COMMUNISM by gstoddart · · Score: 1

    In Soviet Russia, humanity serves inventions!

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  11. Wow 48 lawyers!? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What a great way to dispose of toxic wa

  12. Pretty sure you are trolling but... by SuperKendall · · Score: 2

    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.

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
    1. Re:Pretty sure you are trolling but... by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      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

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
  13. Re:We don't need density! We need longer life! by goarilla · · Score: 1

    Then try SLC Enterprise SSD's.

  14. TLC NAND = unstable? by Misagon · · Score: 1

    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.

    --
    "We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
    1. Re:TLC NAND = unstable? by SQL+Error · · Score: 1

      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.

  15. Re:We don't need density! We need longer life! by MrL0G1C · · Score: 2

    WTH were you doing to them? I call BS.

    --
    Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
  16. Tosh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Tosh Tosh Tosh ToshIBA TOSHIBA

  17. Re:We don't need density! We need longer life! by AcquaCow · · Score: 1

    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.

    Disclaimer: I work for a large flash company and have been selling this stuff for the last 5 years.

    -- Dave

    --

    up 12 days, 22:30, 2 users, load averages: 993.20, 994.21, 994.56
    *makes note to limit user processes...
  18. Re:We don't need density! We need longer life! by goarilla · · Score: 1
    Then what do you recommend the OP to which I was replying ?

    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.

  19. Re:We don't need density! We need longer life! by kwbauer · · Score: 1

    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.

  20. Re:We don't need density! We need longer life! by kwbauer · · Score: 1

    I recommend he quit lying about how crappy things are but that's just my opinion.

  21. Re:We don't need density! We need longer life! by Misagon · · Score: 1

    From what I have heard, the Samsung 840 is scandalously bad and most other types should fare better.

    --
    "We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
  22. Re:We don't need density! We need longer life! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And point to:

    http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYUi29UePoA&feature=youtu.be

    He must be lying or have some bad hardware for his SSDs to fail so soon. I will be testing the power supply myself. Or just go to enterprise drives that have better power protection in them.