NAND Flash Shrinks To 15/16nm Process, Further Driving Prices Down

Lucas123 writes: Both Micron and Toshiba are producing NAND flash memory based on 15 and 16 nanometer process technology, which reduces die area over a 16GB MLC chip by 28% compared with previous die technology. Additionally, Micron announced its upcoming consumer USB flash drives and internal SSDs will also use triple-level cell NAND flash (a technology expected to soon dominate the market) storing three bits instead of two for the first time and further reducing production cost. The advancement in NAND flash density has been driving SSD pricing down dramatically over the past few years. In fact, over the last year, the average price for 128GB and 256GB SSDs have dropped to $50 and $90, respectively, for system manufacturers, according to DRAMeXchange. And prices for consumers have dropped to an average of $91.55 for a 128GB SSD and $164.34 for a 256GB SSD.

Comments

Cheaper than that

[pushing-robot]

I just picked up a Samsung 850 EVO 500GB for $149, and prices could be driven down further in the coming months as 32-layer and 48-layer chips show up.

It's getting harder to justify spinning disks at home, especially as the traditional data hogs (backups, videos) are largely moving to 'the cloud'.

Re:single, multi, triple

[ShanghaiBill]

Whadayamean, "for the first time"? We've had three bits per cell for a while.

Indeed. Samsung has had TLC flash (3 bits or 8 levels) since at least 2012.

Note how the prices sink while the fabs get ever more expensive. Can't be much margin left in that game.

The fab cost goes up, but as the density increases, so does the capacity of the fab. So they make it up on volume.

Also note that the number of available cycles per cell drops with the process density AND with the number of bits per cell.

In general, it is better to have dense, yet unreliable, storage, and then fix the reliability problems with higher level error correction and redundancy. This will often give you more capacity, and more overall reliability.

Re:single, multi, triple

[phoenix_rizzen]

Reading comprehension fail.

The sentence clearly states that Micron will be using TLC for the first time. Not that the SSD industry will be using TLC for the first time ever.

Re:There's prices and then there's Apple prices

[tlhIngan]

FTFS: "prices for consumers have dropped to an average of $91.55 for a 128GB SSD and $164.34 for a 256GB SSD"

Perhaps I'm missing something, but why would an additional 256 GB flash cost $300 and an additional 768 GB cost $800 when you buy a 15" MacBook Pro? Or perhaps there's a boardroom in Cupertino where they're laughing and shoveling money the whole day :D

Well, the MacBook Pro doesn't use SATA SSDs, because SATA is bottlenecking SSD performance. SATA3 SSDs are only getting 540MB/sec - a really magic figure because every SATA SSD is hitting it these days. They're basically at the point where there's so much excess performance in an SSD that you can cut back on stuff like capacitors and use performance killing modes to operate safely without them.

The SSD in the MacBook Pro is hitting speeds of 2GB/sec reads (nearly 4 times SATA) and 1.5GB/sec writes (nearly 3 times SATA).

So part of the justification is well, you're getting really freaking fast SSDs. I think they actually tried it - copying an 8GB video file from that SSD to itself took around 15 seconds (which included all the filesystem overhead). That';s 4 seconds to read, 6 seconds to write, and 5 seconds for the OS to mess about or inefficiency in its buffers or whatever.