Toshiba Announces 3D Flash With 48 Layers

Posted by Soulskill on Friday March 27, 2015 @09:47AM 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.

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We don't need density! We need longer life! by Anonymous Coward · 2015-03-27 11:48 · 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.