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China's Flash Consumption Grows To 30%; 8TB SSDs Are Coming (computerworld.com)

Posted by timothy on from the stack-'em-deep-and-high dept.

Lucas123 writes: Seven of the world's top 10 smartphone vendors hail from China as does PC giant Lenovo, which is driving up the amount of NAND flash and DRAM the country consumes. This year alone, China is expected to purchase nearly 30% of the world's NAND flash and 21% of its DRAM, according to a report from TrendForce. Additionally, state-backed companies are trying to break into Western markets with SSDs. For example, Sage Microelectronics (SageMicro), a four-year-old company based in Hangzhou, China, plans to release an 8TB SSD next month that will be based on eMMC flash, and it said it will release a 10TB drive next year. Update: 10/16 15:11 GMT by T : Note this interesting highlight from the second story linked above: SageMicron is selling not just drives that emphasize capacity over speed, but also a feature that will do doubt appeal to government agencies or private citizens intent on replicating Mission Impossible-style data wiping. The company's "Smart Destruction" function "can be set to erase encryption keys, perform a drive erase or physically fry the memory chips with a pulse of high voltage ... [and] can be triggered using a digital timer, a mobile phone instruction, or by simply pressing a button. 'Yes, it actually smokes sometimes when you push the button,' [Sage U.S. sales director Troy Rutt] said. 'People like that.'"

67 comments

  1. Broken/missing links? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Broken/missing links?

    1. Re:Broken/missing links? by Twinbee · · Score: 1

      Confirmed.

      --
      Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
    2. Re:Broken/missing links? by sexconker · · Score: 2

      Broken/missing editors?

    3. Re: Broken/missing links? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      http://www.computerworld.com/article/2990446/data-storage-solutions/chinese-ssd-maker-eyes-us-market-for-8tb-drive-intro.html

    4. Re:Broken/missing links? by davester666 · · Score: 1

      confirmed.

      --
      Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
    5. Re:Broken/missing links? by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      I suspect the editors are missing links.

      Darn. Now I've got the theme tune from that stupid film in my head.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  2. Ok... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And how expensive will that 8TB SSD be... if it's anything near what the current prices are, ain't nobody buying it, other than maybe a couple big companies, but even there, it will just be cheaper to get 8TB worth of HDD along with a redundancy system...

    1. Re:Ok... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      this is "China"... I've been seeing 512Gb Chinese brand SSDs the price of regular 120Gb already, these 8Tb will be most likely be priced like they are 2Tb regular SSDs

    2. Re:Ok... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      It will be cheap, however the statement should read:

      China, plans to release an 8TB* SSD next month

      *8GB operating in loop mode

    3. Re:Ok... by justthinkit · · Score: 1

      The article said a 5TB SSD from the same company was "north of $5,000". So, somewhere in that range.

      --
      I come here for the love
  3. Every Company is state-owned by Etherwalk · · Score: 1

    Almost every company in China is effectively state owned, or at least state-backed in part. They all work through and often raise debt from Bank of China, which is a *lot* more involved in day-to-day company financing than the Federal Reserve.

    1. Re:Every Company is state-owned by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The Bank of China itself is a state-owned company focusing on loans and financial markets. I think you mean the People's Bank of China, which is the Federal Reserve's counterpart.

    2. Re:Every Company is state-owned by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Probably both, China gives much less of the shit about the financial sectors profits and banks have a fuckton of derelict loans made out to companies in the manufacturing sector, every so often one of them strikes gold.

      Judging from their economical growth it seems to be working nicely for them

    3. Re:Every Company is state-owned by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Wow, China really is very different from "western" countries.

      In China, most companies are effectively state owned.

      In the west, most states are effectively company owned.

  4. And they're going to ruin the name of SSDs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The already miserable reliability reputation of SSDs pales on comparison to what will happen when the market is flooded by cheap Chinese knockoffs with questionable quality control.

    1. Re:And they're going to ruin the name of SSDs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Knock-offs? Knock-off of what? The Chinese drives are not knock-offs, they are uniquely branded. You seem to think that some manufacturer, or country, has a universal claim on electronic storage devices.

    2. Re:And they're going to ruin the name of SSDs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The already miserable reliability reputation of SSDs pales on comparison to what will happen when the market is flooded by cheap Chinese knockoffs with questionable quality control.

      Heh. You mean like some of the thumb drives on Amazon?

    3. Re:And they're going to ruin the name of SSDs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ...Miserable reliability? Did you just time travel here from 10 years ago?

    4. Re:And they're going to ruin the name of SSDs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I can't tell if this is a troll or ignorance.

      Reliability? They are not 100%, but they have come a long since even a few years ago. In fact, they are more reliable than hard drives now, especially in conditions where shock is an issue (laptops.)

      The difference is especially visible with virtualization. Stick a 7200 RPM SSD in place of a HDD, and VM performance will distinctly improve, just because the SSD can handle the random I/O, while the HDD is still spinning, waiting for access to the tracks with an empty cache.

    5. Re:And they're going to ruin the name of SSDs by justthinkit · · Score: 1

      Well, one of the problems mentioned in the article is that this SSD will not have cache RAM. So it is projected to be slow. Slow equals "not as good".

      There are many ways to make something poorly.

      --
      I come here for the love
    6. Re:And they're going to ruin the name of SSDs by michrech · · Score: 1

      I can't tell if this is a troll or ignorance.

      Reliability? They are not 100%, but they have come a long since even a few years ago. In fact, they are more reliable than hard drives now, especially in conditions where shock is an issue (laptops.)

      The difference is especially visible with virtualization. Stick a 7200 RPM SSD in place of a HDD, and VM performance will distinctly improve, just because the SSD can handle the random I/O, while the HDD is still spinning, waiting for access to the tracks with an empty cache.

      I've never heard of an SSD with moving parts...

      --
      bork bork bork!
    7. Re: And they're going to ruin the name of SSDs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How do you stop the cables from being tangled when you spin your SSD so quickly?

    8. Re: And they're going to ruin the name of SSDs by Kumiorava · · Score: 1

      Is a slow catepillar truck having poor quality compared to ferrari? I bet 8TB disk has many uses and desktop drive is not one of the most important of those.

    9. Re: And they're going to ruin the name of SSDs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you rotate the ssd really fast it helps improve read speeds due to centrifugal force clustering the 1 bits towards the outside and the lighter 0 bits in the center. Practice throwing your laptop in the air like a pizza crust.

    10. Re: And they're going to ruin the name of SSDs by Coren22 · · Score: 1

      Reliability will suck too as they are using SD card chips rather than the flash chips used in modern SSD.

      --
      APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
    11. Re: And they're going to ruin the name of SSDs by shaitand · · Score: 1

      Most people aren't as technically astute as slashdotters. These will be marketed and return side-by-side with quality drives. No doubt less tech savy consumers will do what they've always done and look at capacity vs price. To them SSD just means blazing fast.

      They won't know these are sub-par scams piggy backing on the current buzzwords. Giant SD cards pretending to be the latest SSD chips and with no cache.

    12. Re: And they're going to ruin the name of SSDs by Kumiorava · · Score: 1

      Those disks are almost purely enterprise SSD's, not for consumer.

    13. Re: And they're going to ruin the name of SSDs by shaitand · · Score: 1

      Enterprises are just another class of consumers.

    14. Re:And they're going to ruin the name of SSDs by CanadianMacFan · · Score: 1

      And the company says that the drives aren't as fast. They aren't claiming it. They've made the decision to have a large and slow drive versus a small and fast one. They are being open about the design choices they have made.

    15. Re:And they're going to ruin the name of SSDs by CanadianMacFan · · Score: 1

      I prefer spending the extra and getting the 15k RPM SSDs.

  5. china devalue currency to make the price good by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    china can just devalue currency to make the price good.

    1. Re:china devalue currency to make the price good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      China prices products in $US so to devalue their currency just earns them more of their own currency.

    2. Re:china devalue currency to make the price good by LifesABeach · · Score: 0

      China has a currency? Is it the "China Buck?"

    3. Re:china devalue currency to make the price good by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      China prices products in $US so to devalue their currency just earns them more of their own currency.

      If they devalue, they earn the same US dollars, but pay less in wages and also for any raw materials that are sourced locally. So their profit margins go up, at least temporarily, until the resulting inflation starts pushing up wages and local prices.

    4. Re:china devalue currency to make the price good by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 1

      If they devalue, they earn the same US dollars, but pay less in wages and also for any raw materials that are sourced locally. So their profit margins go up, at least temporarily, until the resulting inflation starts pushing up wages and local prices.

      Doesn't work that way. If they devalue relative to other currencies, the foreign exchange changes but in the short term, the internal value is approximately the same until the internal economy adjusts.

      So relatively speaking, they'd actually be bringing in more $ (relative to their own currency), but paying the same for wages and domestic raw materials. Pretty much the opposite of what you said.

      As a practical matter, their export prices would normally go down along with their currency, so the only thing they gain is a bit more export business.

    5. Re:china devalue currency to make the price good by garyisabusyguy · · Score: 1

      Historically China has demonstrated the ability to grow substantially by keeping the value of their currency low compared to the US dollar

      They would seem to have already refuted your position

      --
      Wherever You Go, There You Are
    6. Re:china devalue currency to make the price good by dunkelfalke · · Score: 1

      They won't pay the same for domestic raw materials because they are a global market and thus it would make more sense to export raw materials if they devalue their currency.

      --
      "It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
    7. Re:china devalue currency to make the price good by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 1

      Only if you misunderstood my position.

  6. Unfortunately, it stopped there by Krishnoid · · Score: 4, Funny

    It showed great growth up to 30%, but then it went back to the beginning and started overwriting itself.

    1. Re:Unfortunately, it stopped there by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It showed great growth up to 30%, but then it went back to the beginning and started overwriting itself.

      Heh. There has been a severe lack of jokes on Slashdot for some time. Thanks for keeping the tradition alive.

    2. Re:Unfortunately, it stopped there by LifesABeach · · Score: 1

      I'd wish they get the Pita Byte drives working soon. I'd like to make my pron collection more portable.

    3. Re:Unfortunately, it stopped there by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Is anyone getting the joke? It was good.

    4. Re:Unfortunately, it stopped there by Coren22 · · Score: 1

      Sounds tasty too. Everyone loves a good Pita, I make mine into Gyros.

      --
      APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
  7. Decoupling of currency and Chinese economy by roman_mir · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Like I said over the years, China is being held down by its currency peg. They have removed it and now Chinese currency will be able to go up when the USD will go down, allowing Chinese not to absorb USA the inflation created by the USA Federal reserve and the government. I fully expect Chinese to start consuming all of the products they produce, not just Flash SSD and the prices for all consumable goods will go down in Chinese currency but up in other currencies, as the Chinese money will go up in value relative to other currencies.

    Stock up on various non-perishable goods.

    --
    You can't handle the truth.
    1. Re:Decoupling of currency and Chinese economy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > Chinese currency will be able to go up when the USD will go down

      Like the old JPM said, "it will fluctuate".

      > allowing Chinese not to absorb USA the inflation created by the USA Federal reserve and the government

      What inflation?

      > I fully expect Chinese to start consuming all of the products they produce

      The excessive production in China is staggering. Cement, steel and cotton, to name a few. The whole point of their newfangled Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank is to export the excessive production.

      > and the prices for all consumable goods will go down in Chinese currency

      If the Chinese is able to consume all the products they make, wouldn't the demand drive up the price?

      > as the Chinese money will go up in value relative to other currencies

      Again, it will fluctuate.

      > Stock up on various non-perishable goods.

      You must have lost your /sarc tag.

    2. Re:Decoupling of currency and Chinese economy by Ryanrule · · Score: 0

      lol ok russkie.

    3. Re:Decoupling of currency and Chinese economy by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 1

      I fully expect ... prices for all consumable goods will go down in Chinese currency but up in other currencies, as the Chinese money will go up in value relative to other currencies.

      It's not that simple. That would be very bad for their economy, since they rely so much on exports. Higher value Chinese currency = higher-priced exports. That would be very bad for their economy, since it relies so much on exports.

      Not so much if it didn't rely on exports, but that would be a very big change, over a long period of time.

    4. Re:Decoupling of currency and Chinese economy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "What inflation?"

      Are you taking the fucking piss?
      Go look up what quantitative easing is and why printing money is fucking stupid.

      The Fed made a MAJOR, stupid mistake, inflation is coming and it will be bad, very bad.

  8. It's eMMC - an embedded SD card by raymorris · · Score: 2

    The summary says it's eMMC. MMC is basically SD cards. eMMC is embedded MMC - basically an SD card built-in.

    Right now on Newegg you can get a pair of 128GB cards (256GB) for $69.
    http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
    So $280 per TB is current best pricing for MMC in Newegg.

    Compare an actual SSD. Low-end best price at Newegg is $343 for a TB ($300 for 960GB), with better quality SSDs costing over $1,000.

    Neither is TERRIBLY expensive for 8TB, if you really need 8TB of flash, but 8 1TB true SSDs would cost about the same as 8TB of MMC.

  9. Chinese currency by ThorGod · · Score: 1

    I genuinely fear for the US and the world when the Chinese currency finally corrects.

    --
    PS: I don't reply to ACs.
    1. Re:Chinese currency by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Currency" is overvalued.

      This is not a statement about the exchange rate, but about the importance of currency value. The exchange rate tends to self-correct, and intervention tends to eventually exhaust its own means.

      Instead of worrying about Chinese currency, worry about its internal re-balancing and implications for the world. It's hard, as too many unproductive investments need to be marked to the market, and wealth that exist on paper will reveal itself as non-existent. If the correction goes chaotic, be really afraid of the counterparty risk -- by then the currency value is among the least concerns.

    2. Re:Chinese currency by Ryanrule · · Score: 1

      its correcting downward.

    3. Re:Chinese currency by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That will never happen. This is just China's way of "quantitatively easing" some of their tech industry from further plummeting shares on their market. Fat cats getting a "too big to fail" pass.

      Same way the USA does with pork bills and other "quantitatively easing" measures.

      Everyone is doing it, even the EU, the real economy is broke taxes have never been higher and wages lower. Recession is well in place in the real working world. It is but these "too big to fail" and "quantitative easing" approaches that keep the "financial markets" of the high class 1%'ers from uncovering the current severe recession.

      Even the recent negotiations to end tax havens is a almost laughable if it weren't so pathetic at the pony show attempts.
      Approximately 7 years passed (depending on when one wants to start counting, from the early signs or the media frenzy) and all that has been done was and still is to keep appearances and save the "too big" dancing chairs.

  10. WTF? SageMicro eMMC?!? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    this makes no sense unless you need to dump a bunch of memory cards, who would want this?

    like making a raid from a bunch of thumb drives LOL

    1. Re:WTF? SageMicro eMMC?!? by swb · · Score: 1

      like making a raid from a bunch of thumb drives LOL

      How bad would that be, really? Even the store-branded USB3 flash drives at Microcenter have reasonable benchmarks. I get 110 MB/sec sequential reads and 70 MB/sec sequential writes out of one.

      I would expect something approaching 200 MB/sec sequential reads out of a simple mirror of them, a RAID-10 set of 4 ought to improve on that for reads and double write speeds.

      As for practical value, OK, it's probably pretty low, but I don't think I paid all that much for a USB3 128 GB thumb drive. It's not hard to see where it might actually be useful for some scratchpad uses to have a 256 GB RAID-10 or even a 512 GB RAID-0 array of thumb drives.

      And if you could make the process of creating such an array simple and make it portable to another system, the idea that you could have a reasonably fast, usefully large array you could put in your pocket might not be bad.

      There might even be some privacy value to a physically portable array that striped the data in a way that having only one or two of the members wasn't enough to reconstruct the data, or conversely, the loss of one or two of the members wouldn't be enough to lose all the data.

      It's always kind of annoyed me that Microsoft's built-in array functionality wouldn't let you use a thumb drive to create a storage space or one of the older software RAID sets,

    2. Re:WTF? SageMicro eMMC?!? by Coren22 · · Score: 1

      The reliability of that type of flash memory is terrible. TLC cells aren't much better though, so I am not sure if it would be a bad thing, or very bad thing.

      --
      APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
    3. Re:WTF? SageMicro eMMC?!? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Like the cheap Samsung EVO SSD, They seem fast because of their SLC cache but what about the actual storage being TLC flash?
      I don't know how long the will last...

  11. When did Korea become part of China? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Geez, what a BS story. Samsung is now part of China? Top '10' based on what fact? Crapware installed? /. SUCKS!

  12. borken by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Nobody is going to by a SSD that breaks in 3 weeks

  13. and its going to be pictures of food by 0xdeaddead · · Score: 1

    and girls with the peace sign. welcome to china! Selfie stick central!

  14. Food for thought . . . . by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Anybody else speed-read the topic and get the impression that it said "China's FLESH consumption grows to 30%. . . . ?"

    . . . and then decide it's wasn't interesting enough to read.

  15. encryption+self destruct = want by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    http://www.sage-micro.com/module-8.html
    this should be a standard feature for all mobile device storage

  16. What about SAS3 / 12 Gbps? by PeeAitchPee · · Score: 1

    8 TB on a single SSD is great and all, but I'd rather that the flash manufacturers focus on moving their mainstream interfaces over to SAS3 like the enterprise storage world has done. What good is all of this fast storage on a single drive if you're capped by the bandwidth of the drive's interface?

    1. Re:What about SAS3 / 12 Gbps? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      they skipped SAS, it was only intermediary standard
      PCIE/M.2 is what you are supposed to buy if you dont want low end SATA drives, SAS is more expensive and slower than M.2/PCIE drives

  17. 'People like that.' by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    or by simply pressing a button. 'Yes, it actually smokes sometimes when you push the button,' [Sage U.S. sales director Troy Rutt] said. 'People like that.'"

    Ah ha ha, that's going to be so much fun around my 3 year old ....

  18. 8TB or "8TB"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Will China's 8TB SSD be a real 8TB SSD, or will it be like those 10mF capacitors being sold on Ebay from Shenzen, that, when you open them up, host a 0.1uF capacitor inside? Or the "8GB" USB 3.0 flash drive ("Star Tech Brand, Best Quality!!!") that are really a 32MB USB2.0 flash drive with a fancy yellow plastic housing.

    China, will your silly antics ever end?

  19. Self-destruct, the ultimate DOS target. by dsmatthews9379 · · Score: 1

    What could possibly go wrong with a data-center full of self-destructing drives?