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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.
It will be a long time before that gets cheap enough to make flash obsolete, if ever. XPoint is going to be priced somewhere between enterprise flash and DRAM, which will put it at around ten times the price of consumer flash.
If you gave me the choice between a 1TB SSD using NAND, or a 100GB SSD that had much more performance and endurance, I would take the 1TB SSD.
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.
Our storage mediums spun and made noises! And we liked it!
I wonder how these stack up... ahem with intels new offering.
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]
64Gb, not 64GB. Multiply your prices by 8.
Still, even at ~$150/tb the use cases for spinning disks are steadily diminishing.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
XPoint 3D still has a ways to go with price (and the fact that it isn't out in the field yet.) It is still too expensive to be a 100% replacement for SSD, just like SSD is too expensive to replace HDDs everywhere.
However, XPoint 3D does have its uses. Loading the core OS, application, and kernel come to mind as well as having a swap volume (pretty much the same concept as mainframe "external RAM" which was slower.)
Isn't Micron a step ahead with their 384Gb NAND chip?: http://www.micron.com/about/in...
I think you got bits and bytes confused, pretty sure there's no 64GB NAND = 512 Gbit NAND to be had anywhere. So you can multiply all those prices by 8 for $205-457 for a TB. Even if it goes down to $160/TB that's still a lot more than HDDs.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
Holo storage was supposed to be out back in 1991-1992 (Tamarak), then about 10 years later, InPhase supposedly had a drive for it, but never made it to the market (IIRC).
Would be nice if that technology would get off the ground, but so far, it has been nothing but vapor. I would wager Half Life 3 comes out well before then.
I genuinely like to know what is "trollish" about my post. I'm just trying to make the reasonable prediction that cheap/dense SSDs and XPoint mean more about the death of platter drives as a storage medium than XPoint making SSDs obsolete.
I also agree with the other point made here that HDD manufacturers would be better served at looking to be a future replacement for tape media as an enterprise archival method.
Perhaps my mention of the artificial propping up of prices angered some slashdot mods? It's not like we haven't seen commodity pricing rise and fall on lots of PC components (the RAM pricing after the Sumitomo explosion is a big example of this). 2TB HDDs could be had for less than $50 before the Thai floods. They've barely returned to that pricing... 3~4 years down the road? Likewise, the industry has contracted AND considerably slowed higher capacity drives to market, even though the new infrastructure built to replace the flooded factories was supposed to facilitate all the new tech for 6TB and 8TB drives. Simple logic makes the truth abundantly clear: platter drive makers have been manipulating prices and the market to reap in higher margins, at the expense of progress for consumers. That's not a troll... unless the mods marking up the post are Western Digital and Seagate executives.
Normal people aren't going to mess with a dead drive and serious enterprise customers are not going to have only one copy of their data.
Ultimately, all that matters is cost. Speed is even somewhat of an optional thing with the larger archival volumes. Although you do need enough speed to make populating (or recovering from) an entire drive practical.
I'm recovering a 4TB drive right now and it's moving as fast as all of the associated bottlenecks will allow.
I don't care what the underlying tech is. It just can't be so overpriced that I can't have a duplicate (or even a 3rd copy).
Dying gracefully with some warning would be nice but is it's not a showstopper if that's missing. A few of my HDDs have given no notice or not enough.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The general idea that SSDs will gradually encroach on HDD markets is correct and has been happening, albeit at a somewhat slow pace. While predictions about the disappearance of HDDs have existed for almost the last ten years, units sales of HDDs still dominate and probably will for quite a few more years. Microdrives disappeared about a decade ago, but that has so far been the only HDD market to completely evaporate. SSD are increasingly gaining ground in low-margin markets, such as laptops, but even there, most laptops still ship with HDDs due to cost and/or capacity reasons. In the enterprise performance and archive/cold storage markets, HDDs dominate even more as SSD cost and cost/capacity won't catch up to that for HDDs for a while (possible a very long while).
Maybe, maybe not. Detailed specification of a xpoint 3d final component has still to exists, while the 3D NAND is the continuity of a well know technology. I am particularly curious at the temperature effect on the xpoint 3d cells, because others "innovative" memory that exists today are not very good in this area.
http://akoniaholographics.com/products/
they switched from offering a end user drive to full rack-mounted usage scenario after they went bankrupt, and changed their name.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Or in a hybrid platter/XP3 or SSD/XP3 drive, like platter/SSD hybrid drives now.
So far SSDs have only barely kept up with software bloat. They need more density.
XPoint is less dense. A lot less dense. So it will be more expensive for GB.
The HDD manufacturers are still making the 15k RPM SAS HDD. Why? Because you can't use cheap SSDs in the data center. So the enterprise SSDs we're talking about are several times more expensive than the laptop SSDs. Depending on the workload, cost per performance may or may not be better for SSDs. Because SSDs are mostly considered as a caching layer between DRAM and HDDs, the workloads tend be be write-heavy, which increases wear leveling overhead and impacts performance.
So, will SSDs kill off the enterprise HDD market? Maybe, but it's not happening now or in the near term. Also, SSDs as a caching layer is itself pressured by DRAM, which is much more expensive but also much faster.