Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Western Digital Unveils First-Ever 512Gb 64-Layer 3D NAND Chip (betanews.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the first-of-its-kind dept.

BrianFagioli quotes a report from BetaNews: As great as these solid state drives are now, they are only getting better. For example, SATA-based SSDs were once viewed as miraculous, but they are now looked at as slow -- PCIe-based NVMe drives are all the rage. To highlight the steady evolution of flash storage, Western Digital today unveiled the first-ever 512 gigabit 64-layer 3D NAND chip. "The launch of the industry's first 512Gb 64-layer 3D NAND chip is another important stride forward in the advancement of our 3D NAND technology, doubling the density from when we introduced the world's first 64-layer architecture in July 2016. This is a great addition to our rapidly broadening 3D NAND technology portfolio. It positions us well to continue addressing the increasing demand for storage due to rapid data growth across a wide range of customer retail, mobile and data center applications," says Dr. Siva Sivaram, executive vice president, memory technology, Western Digital. Western Digital further explains that it did not develop this new technology on its own. The company shares, "The 512Gb 64-layer chip was developed jointly with the company's technology and manufacturing partner Toshiba. Western Digital first introduced initial capacities of the world's first 64-layer 3D NAND technology in July 2016 and the world's first 48-layer 3D NAND technology in 2015; product shipments with both technologies continue to retail and OEM customers."

2 of 78 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why are they expensive? by xlsior · · Score: 4, Informative

    1) because they can 2) it takes a while to recoup the investment money of the $$$$ fabrication equipment

  2. Re:PCIe RAID by nuckfuts · · Score: 3, Informative

    Are PCIe drives so reliable now, as to not needing RAID?

    Personally, I never want a single point-of-failure in my storage system, no matter how reliable the devices are. Good NVMe SSD drives aren't cheap though, so I can imagine people running them without RAID if they're very confident about their backups and can withstand a bit of downtime.

    What I find really interesting though is pushing the limits of performance by striping two or more of these drives together in RAID 0.

    You're right, however, that hardware support for PCIe RAID is not really there yet.