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.

Comments

Re:Too bad

[mlts]

What HDD makers really need to do is stop focusing on price and make a line of drives that is made to be archival grade. For example, there was a line of drives with two read/write heads that worked in an active/active configuration.

What might be even better would be to make a standardized, rugged drive cartridge case, similar to iMation's RDX. Something that can handle drops, be gripped easily by a tape silo's robotic mechanism, can handle tens of thousands of mounts/dismounts, has built in encryption, the ability to have WORM functionality (similar to late gen DLT drives where the cartridge can be formatted as normal or WORM), and so on. The drive can be presented either as a tape volume, standalone JBOD hard disk, or part of a RAID set (and inserted/ejected at the same time with 2-3 companions.)

Moving HDD to a backup/archive use as opposed to primary storage will keep this technology relevant, as opposed to trying to fight with SSD (which is a better primary storage technology [1].)

[1]: In all ways but recovery. An SSD goes bad, there is no way to recover the data, period.