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Toshiba, SanDisk Piloting 3D NAND That Doubles Previous Capacity
Lucas123 writes: Under a joint development agreement, Toshiba and SanDisk have begun pilot production of a new 48-layer 256Gb NAND flash chip in a brand new fab in Mie prefecture, Japan. The new X3 chips, which double capacity from 16GB to 32GB over the previous product, are made with triple-level cell (TLC) flash compared with Toshiba's last multi-level cell (MLC) chip, which stored two-bits per transistor. The chips are expected to begin shipping in products next year. The companies plan to use the new memory in a wide number of products, including consumer SSDs, smartphones, tablets, memory cards, and enterprise SSDs for data centers, the companies said.
The data longevity of 3-bits per cell NAND is quite poor. MLC's 2-bits per cell still has me uneasy. Storing 1 of 8 voltage levels in an environment that leaks electrons over time is not for me. I'll wait for XPoint before upgrading my MLC SSD.
XPoint won't be 10x the price - more like 3x~4x the price of consumer flash when it hits the market.
The economy of scales will drive production up as it is incorporated into mobile devices and enterprise systems, which will also drive down price. XPoint is really more a matter of dooming platter drives to extinction, because the durability, power consumption, and speed will make it highly desirable in the enterprise market.
I wouldn't be surprised if XPoint hits the "tipping point" of $200 for 512GB within 2 years of production, making it a prime choice for enthusiasts. Meanwhile, SSDs will continue to edge out platter as the "cheap" mass storage option for most consumers.
We've seen Samsung 512GB drives hit $135 shipped to consumers recently. On Black Friday? Maybe we'll see them hit $100 or less. Once this 3D NAND hits full production, expect those prices to plummet. Meanwhile, platter drive makers are still trying to eke out every dollar with artificially propped up pricing, caught in a bit of a quandary... consumers rarely need more than 2TB, but the lowest you can produce a drive... any drive... is around $30; $/GB is not as scalable for platter drives as it is for SSDs (or XPoint), because you have a minimum BOM to fill before you can get a platter spinning and reading data, a baseline cost. Higher capacity drives can make you money, but consumers aren't buying them. Yes... you can sell $40 2TB drives all day long, but stockholders don't like that sort of crappy profit margin, so they continue propping up the price on a 5 year old disaster (Thai floods) as SSDs quickly play catch up on pricing with a far more compelling product. [Insert buggy whip story here]