Toshiba, SanDisk Piloting 3D NAND That Doubles Previous Capacity

Posted by timothy on Tuesday August 4, 2015 @02:20AM from the floppies-just-won't-cut-it dept.

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.

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Will not buy TLC NAND by D.McG. · 2015-08-04 02:38 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.