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Intel and Micron Partnership Soon To Launch 10TB SSD For Enterprise Market (hothardware.com)

Posted by yaelk on from the word-on-the-web dept.

MojoKid writes: Intel and Micron have been tag-teaming various storage and memory technologies and word on the web is that the fruits of that partnership is a 10-terebyte SSD that's right around the corner. The largest SSD in Intel's stable at the moment is 4TB, which itself is pretty large. However, both Micron and Intel are of the opinion that typical planar NAND flash memory has gone about as far as it can go, and that 3D stacked Flash memory is the future. They've also developed a "floating gate cell" design - a first for 3D stacked memory - resulting in 256Gb multi-level cell (MLC) and 384Gb triple-level cell (TLC) die that fit inside of a standard package. The two companies are targeting gumstick-sized SSDs reaching 3.5TB and regular 2.5-inch SSDs hitting (and even surpassing) 10TB. Apparently that's about to become a reality.

4 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. Hard Drives are dying by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 3, Informative

    I've said for a while now, that Spinning Hard Drives are dying breed. This is just another nail in the coffin, as SSD sizes start to surpass traditional HDD. The last remaining bit that HDDs have over SSD is cost per MB. However if you include OTHER costs associated with HDDs (Watts per drive) even those advantages shrink (or go away).

    IMHO once these higher density SSD drives arrive, there will be little or nothing for me to recommend standard HDD, for any application. None. There is barely any reason to have spinning drives right now.

    --
    Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
    1. Re:Hard Drives are dying by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      Disclosure: I work in this field but I won't tell you who I work for.

      Regarding endurance, the myth that HDDs have greater endurance than flash (even MLC and TLC) is just that - a myth. Every HDD will die eventually, frequently when they have to be turned off and won't start up again because all of the grease has been spun out of the motor bearings.

      See this: https://www.micron.com/about/blogs/2016/february/the-myth-of-hdd-endurance

      SSD density (at 4TB in 2.5" x 7mm or 9mm high) is already more dense per square inch than HDDs (10TB in 3.5" x 1" high). Power consumption is much lower too. Combined with the fact that HDDs today are slower per megabyte than ever (10TB drives spin at the same 7200 RPM that 120GB drives did), the near future holds the end of the HDD in the majority of applications.

      That said, we have been calling for the death of the mainframe for years, as well as the death of tape for years, and neither have died. HDDs will continue to have a place in the world, but they will be by and large replaced with flash. In the enterprise space, changes in software also mean that most of this flash will be server attached rather than part of a SAN.

    2. Re:Hard Drives are dying by swb · · Score: 3, Informative

      That said, we have been calling for the death of the mainframe for years, as well as the death of tape for years, and neither have died. HDDs will continue to have a place in the world, but they will be by and large replaced with flash. In the enterprise space, changes in software also mean that most of this flash will be server attached rather than part of a SAN.

      I think the death of tape hasn't happened because there isn't a functional replacement for it for high capacity, long-term archiving. HDDs don't work well in changers, are more fragile and I don't think anyone trusts their powered off shelf life.

      I know that clustered/distributed/server-local storage is becoming a competitor to centralized SAN, but I think it will be something of a limited market. Virtualization and CPU improvements have cut node counts significantly, making it harder to obtain redundant node counts necessary for this to see a lot of adoption.

      Even the vendors with decent products now charge so much for licensing that they're not remotely competitive on pricing. I saw a price analysis of VMware vSAN that put it more expensive by 2-3x over a conventional SAN. MS Storage Spaces isn't really flexible enough yet although it's clear MS wants it to go this way, but it doesn't seem like it will be there or agnostic enough for heterogeneous workloads for years.

  2. Re:Is this based on 3D Xpoint? by Areyoukiddingme · · Score: 5, Informative

    The new Intel/Micron "flash successor" that's supposed to be faster and more durable?

    It's not. Both from this announcement and from the original announcement covered here on Slashdot just under a year ago, we see that it's MLC and TLC nand flash. Multilayer (a.k.a. 3D! Now with more Ds!) rather than single layer, but otherwise still bog standard nand flash. Evidently it took a while to get the yields up. Looks like they intend to crater the price per gigabyte of flash-based storage while simultaneously offering up XPoint as the (higher priced) upgrade. And it sounds like Samsung anticipated them doing exactly that, and is working to unload their single layer inventory as fast as they can.