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

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."

Comments

Re:Hopefully better than their hard drives.

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

I hope it's better than their hard drives.

I call them Western Dataloss for a reason.

I've had more than a few WD drives fail on me. I call them "Write Only Memory" because the chance of getting data back out of them is unlikely.

Why are they expensive?

[goombah99]

If you can get 512Gbits on one chip why are they expensive? Unless yields are low chips are not expensive to manufacture.

Re:Why are they expensive?

[xlsior]

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

Re:Why are they expensive?

[MightyYar]

COGS has little direct correlation to what the market will bear.

Re:Why are they expensive?

[Gravis Zero]

If you can get 512Gbits on one chip why are they expensive? Unless yields are low chips are not expensive to manufacture.

I know this one! "3D lithography" is actually just regular lithography with an ridiculous amount of chemical deposition layers (64 in this case). Each layer has steps to add, subtract and verify that layer was properly made. Overall, this can take several weeks before a wafer is completed and yes, there are defects and they track those defects. They have a suitably high yield or they don't bother making them until they work out the process so that they do. Much of the work is done by machines but humans ensure quality is as optimal as possible. I would say that all in all, it's because it's a lengthy process and people are willing to pay for the resulting chips.

Re:Why are they expensive?

[unixisc]

If you can get 512Gbits on one chip why are they expensive? Unless yields are low chips are not expensive to manufacture.

I think they are expensive to manufacture, particularly depending on which process node. Also, are these NAND chip 1-bit, 2-bit or more bits per cell? That translates into very sensitive voltage sensing, which increases the manufacturing complexity

Re:Why are they expensive?

[Kjella]

If you can get 512Gbits on one chip why are they expensive? Unless yields are low chips are not expensive to manufacture.

Lots of layers = lots of potential for flaws = lower yields. If there's a 99% of a good layer then for 64 layers you only have 0.99^64 = 52% chance of a good chip.

Re:Why are they expensive?

[cdrudge]

If there's a 99% of a good layer then for 64 layers you only have 0.99^64 = 52% chance of a good chip.

"So make twice as many and have a 104% yield" said the PHB.

Re:Hopefully better than their hard drives.

[bobbied]

I don't care what vendor you use...

If you care about your data you either RAID (and monitor) or keep good backups that you routinely test. (preferably both)

My Personal file server is software RAID-5 with a hot spare and a replacement drive on the shelf. PLUS I keep a nightly mirrored backup online and rotate the spindles offsite to the In-laws basement every time we visit. (I know I'm cheap, but 4 Gig is kind of expensive to back up to the cloud and I have security to consider.) I lost a small portion of the photos once and thought my wife was going to kill me, NEVER again unless the zombie apocalypse happens.

WD drives do seem to be on the lower end of reliability, but I really don't care that much myself. I buy what's cheap and I'll toss it when it breaks...

Western Digital Still in Business?

[mattmarlowe]

Maybe I'm just not keeping up, but Western Digital seems to have been on a downward path for quite a long time....I'm not sure why they are still in business.

Back in the early 90's, WD drives were OK, but seagate had a better reputation for anything important. Since then, they seem to have just languished - acquiring other companies products. Their enterprise/datacenter drives aren't that bad, but seagate still seems to rule the roost. On the consumer end, quality control has been quite hit or miss and despite their making ever larger drives at cheaper prices, I would never trust their drives with anything important.

As for SSD's, their competition has really been for the last several years between intel vs samsung versus 3rd parties (kingston/seagate/etc). Does WD sell a lot of SSD's comparatively?

Re:Western Digital Still in Business?

[Random Destruction]

Western Digital seems to have been on a downward path for quite a long time....I'm not sure why they are still in business.

Seagate had a real rough period a few years back. Their 1.5TB models especially had a lot of trouble. A lot of people are still boycotting them for that reason. Not sure how long your "long time" is.

Boycotting manufacturers rather than models is pointless, but it's like banks. People get screwed and vow never to give money to X again, even though Y and Z are equally likely to screw them.

Re:Western Digital Still in Business?

[Anonymous Coward]

WD has had the market share lead over Seagate for several years now, although they are fairly close.

Western Digital has also been more willing to embrace SSDs than Seagate. They had some SSDs that were nothing ground breaking but they were available and more recently (Q2 2016) they've bought out Sandisk which gave them NAND fab capacity via Sandisk's joint venture with Toshiba.

The last quarter I was able to find data for was Q3 2016 Western Digital is the second leading brand of SSDs (15.5% of market) behind Samsung (36.9%) via their SanDisk product line. Seagate on the other hand has been slow to bring any SSD (although they have tried a few Hybrid drives) to the wider market. The SSDs Seagate does have they are targeting exclusively at the enterprise market and registered 0.1% market share.

Toshiba has the 3rd largest share of the SSD market (and second largest NAND), mainly through OEM deals but also with the OCZ brand - there has been some rumors of Toshiba selling that part of the business and chip division - Western Digital is the likely buyer in the rumor, some other names (like foxconn) have also been mentioned as being interested.

Re:Western Digital Still in Business?

[Solandri]

WD has been buying up SSD companies - mostly small ones in the enterprise market. My brother-in-law (international trade lawyer) interviewed with one of these small SSD companies, rejected their offer, then got a job at WD. A year later, WD bought that SSD company and he got put in charge of prepping them for International sales.

I would never trust their drives with anything important.

Nobody with truly important data trusts any drives with anything important. Local and cloud storage have gotten so cheap it's trivial to have multiple backups and RAID redundancy. If I could have a nickel for every person who comes to me begging to help them recover data off a drive which stopped working... Often they're faced with paying a recovery service $500+, all because they were too cheap to spend $80 on an external backup drive, or $20 for a USB flash drive (need to refresh these every few years for maximum safety) or some blank DVDs.

If you have a Gmail account, Google already gives you free unlimited cloud storage of all your photos up to 16 MP. They also let you store videos for free, although I haven't been able to find what the limits are (used to be 15 minutes max per video, but I believe the new limit is just 1080p). If you have Amazon Prime, it also includes unlimited storage of any size photos. And if you subscribe to Office 365, it includes 1 TB of cloud storage. Please, take advantage of these to back up the irreplaceable photos and videos of your wedding, your child's birth, your child's first steps, etc. It's disheartening having to tell people they will have to choose between recovering these precious memories and a half month's rent.

Re:Western Digital Still in Business?

[Mashiki]

Seagate had a real rough period a few years back

Few years back? I can't remember a time when Seagate wasn't having problems. Hell back in the 90's it was so bad that you could get factory sealed boxes(80 units) all DOA. And a few years later, the same thing happened again, and again in the 00's. It leads me to believe that Seagate operates on a "just good enough" margin of failure, and sometimes when they try to shave a few extra pennies per unit, it leads to multiple failures or multiple batch failures.

Re:Western Digital Still in Business?

[colin_faber]

Seagate builds almost a million drives a day of various models. WD is right up there as well, some models are built down to a price to keep them cheap. If you're spending more than the bare minimum on the drives you're likely not going to have too many problems.

Re:Western Digital Still in Business?

[thegarbz]

WD is the largest and most profitable HDD vendor. Of course they have been buying others, when you're that big why wouldn't you buy your way into every segment.

Re:Western Digital Still in Business?

[tlhIngan]

WD has been buying up SSD companies

They've also got a lot of more traditional stuff too - I believe WD bought over Toshiba's 3.5" hard drive business, and they also bought over Toshiba's NAND flash business very recently (a few weeks ago). (Remember, Toshiba invented NAND flash).

Not sure what happens to OCZ, Sandisk, or DiskOnChip, the first Toshiba bought to have their line of SSDs, the second Toshiba acquired cheaply (Sandisk used Toshiba NAND anyways), and ditto DiskOnChip.

Re:Western Digital Still in Business?

[fox171171]

I know it is only anecdotal, but I have mostly WD drives (all mechanical), as I have had the best experience with them, and had bad luck with Seagate in particular.

I have a 320GB and a 500GB(ish?) external WD. Both have been hauled around in a laptop bag on airplanes and helicopters for years. Still work great. Have much newer 1.5TG and 2TB WD externals which have done the same, but not as long. I have (desktop external) 320GB, 750GB, 2TB and 4TB WD models (you can kind of guess the ages by the sizes) all still working away.

I had picked up a Seagate external (1 TB or 1.5TB I think) and it died in less than a year.

Wife's laptop internal (Seagate) drive just failed in less than a year (warranty still good, yay!).
My laptop internal failed recently as well (Toshiba), about 2 months past the 3 year warranty.

At work we had a desktop external Seagate drive also last less than a year.

So I am a small sample size, but anecdotally, my experience is:
- Eight WD drives working fine
- Experience with 3 seagate drives lasting less than a year (2 owned, 1 at work)
- One Toshiba drive lasting 3 years

Re:Western Digital Still in Business?

[dj245]

WD has been buying up SSD companies

They've also got a lot of more traditional stuff too - I believe WD bought over Toshiba's 3.5" hard drive business, and they also bought over Toshiba's NAND flash business very recently (a few weeks ago). (Remember, Toshiba invented NAND flash).

Not sure what happens to OCZ, Sandisk, or DiskOnChip, the first Toshiba bought to have their line of SSDs, the second Toshiba acquired cheaply (Sandisk used Toshiba NAND anyways), and ditto DiskOnChip.

This has a lot less to do with WD going shopping and more to do with Toshiba's financial problems leading to a yard sale.

Re:Western Digital Still in Business?

[TheRaven64]

I was very happy with the first Seagate disk I owned. It lasted for longer than it was a useful size - for all I know, it still works, though there isn't much need for 40MB hard disks these days.

"Hot spare" is a give away

[mi]

My Personal file server is software RAID-5 with a hot spare and a replacement drive on the shelf

While it is, indeed, prudent to keep a cold spare on the shelf, wasting a slot in your enclosure for a "hot spare" is just that — a waste. Here is my proof of it, but you can find other people telling you the same thing.

It is extremely unlikely, that a second disk will randomly die on you during those few hours it will take you to replace the first one with your cold spare and for the array to rebuild. What you want to avoid is correlated failures — when multiple drives fail for the same reason (such as a firmware bug, manufacturing defect, or an environmental factor — like heat).

But having a hot spare online is not helping against that either — buy drives from different manufacturers, different models, and from different batches.

Oh, and if by "software RAID-5" you mean anything other than ZFS (RAID-Z), then you really ought to upgrade.

Re:"Hot spare" is a give away

[Khyber]

"wasting a slot in your enclosure for a "hot spare" is just that — a waste. Here is my proof of it [algebra.com]"

That's a really horrible 'proof' You keep a hot spare so you can simply yank the drive and run in case of a fire, thus your data is still safe, or if you want an off-site backup, you just yank the drive, plug the fresh one in and mirror to it, and take the drive you just pulled wherever you need to go.

And the hot-plug bays for such a thing are like ten bucks. If you aren't going to spend even a measly $10 to improve your data redundancy, you might as well not bother with data redundancy at all.

Re:"Hot spare" is a give away

[mi]

yank the drive and run in case of a fire [emphasis mine], thus your data is still safe

Safe in case of a fire?!

And the hot-plug bays for such a thing are like ten bucks.

This 4-bay enclosure costs over $400, making each slot cost over $100. This 8-bay one is $750...

More importantly, you don't just buy it once — you maintain it. It takes up space. The spinning drive consumes electricity, wears out, produces noise. And none of it is justified — you do not add anything to your data's chances of survival.

.. to improve your data redundancy

You do not improve your data redundancy. That's the whole point.

Re:"Hot spare" is a give away

[fnj]

It is extremely unlikely, that a second disk will randomly die on you during those few hours it will take you to replace the first one with your cold spare and for the array to rebuild.

Utter bullshit. The second drive will not fail "randomly", but through the torture of the rebuild process. Single-drive redundancy like RAID5 is just a good way to lose 100% of your data instead of some of it (individual separate drives). It is BARELY better than non-redundant RAID1 spanning. I don't trust it at all for anything that matters. I don't even think double redundancy (RAID-Z2) is due care for data. I accept nothing less than triple redundancy (RAID-Z3).

Re:"Hot spare" is a give away

[mi]

The second drive will not fail "randomly", but through the torture of the rebuild process.

Yes, there is such an opinion too. But that just confirms, what I said: hot spare is a waste — of money and space.

I don't even think double redundancy (RAID-Z2) is due care for data. I accept nothing less than triple redundancy (RAID-Z3).

Do you have any numbers — how much more reliable is Z3 compared to Z2? But, in any case, you seem to agree, that hot spare is a waste...

Re:"Hot spare" is a give away

[bobbied]

You assume all those drives are the same, purchased at the same time and pace and will fail at the same time? They are not...In my case, the drives are ones I have scavenged from junk heaps and apart from being the same capacity (or nearly so) they are generally not the same. So failure is likely (and in my case, expected).

BTW, because I don't use the file server at home continually, I allow the drives to spin down when idle, so they are not just grinding away 24/7. Sure, I sacrifice a bit of delay when I first access it, but once all the drive are spinning, you don't know the difference. My goal is to NOT LOSE DATA first and foremost, which is why I whish to restore data redundancy ASAP and why I keep the hot spare (well that and have the drive just sitting there) and why I do all the backup madness.... My secondary goal is CHEAP... Which is why the system is built from scrap, why I have software RAID and why I went with RAID 5 (I found enough similar of different makes and RAID 5 got me the most space at the time)....

Also, I built this system from scrap parts nearly a decade ago and it's morphed over the years as new scrap parts became available. I don't think it is an optimal solution today for performance or reliability. However, because CHEAP is the #2 goal, it will be used until it drops or the storage required becomes too big for the drives I can find in the scrap pile...

But my original point is... I don't care what kind of drive you have you must do two things... 1. BACKUPS and 2. Monitor your hardware. All to often folks figure things are install and forget, but for critical data, you got to pay attention.

Re:"Hot spare" is a give away

[mi]

You assume all those drives are the same, purchased at the same time and pace and will fail at the same time?

Not at all — that's a recipe for a correlated failure. My calculations expect the drives to be similar in characteristics — with the real MTTF of 100000 hours (which is about 1/10th of what the manufacturers claim) — but with failures randomly spread across that period. Drives from the same batch doing the same work in the same enclosure will, likely, start dying together.

1. BACKUPS and 2. Monitor your hardware.

Yes, these are perfectly sound principles. My point was only that using a hot spare is a waste — either you are paying too much for the same storage capacity, or you aren't getting as much capacity for the money. Whichever way you look at it, hot spare, while carrying a non-negligible cost, does not improve your data's chances of survival. Do not do it. Do not advise others to do it.

Re:"Hot spare" is a give away

[bobbied]

You assume all those drives are the same, purchased at the same time and pace and will fail at the same time?

Not at all — that's a recipe for a correlated failure. My calculations expect the drives to be similar in characteristics — with the real MTTF of 100000 hours (which is about 1/10th of what the manufacturers claim) — but with failures randomly spread across that period. Drives from the same batch doing the same work in the same enclosure will, likely, start dying together.

,

I have a scrap heap of drives with few similarities other than size. I think 2 where actually purchased for this application at different times, the rest where sourced from who knows where. So your assumptions are incorrect. Plus, not all my drives spin, the "Hot spare" actually only spins when it gets tested every few days. So your "it is not worth it" opinion is not shared by this operator mainly because I am often away from home for days at a time and wouldn't be able to get hands on the hardware. However, at this point, I've not had a drive failure on the RAID-5 array in the past 4 years and I've only had to rebuild the array once when I manually failed a drive that had started to report bad sectors.

Is the hot spare worth it? Perhaps not to you, but for me, the little peace of mind it buys (for having a way to get back to fully redundant) is worth both the aggravation it may produce and the power it consumes. But I hear you, the offline backup is more important...

Re:"Hot spare" is a give away

[mi]

the little peace of mind it buys

The whole point is, it does not buy you anything. You may as well pray for your data — "just in case".

Re: "Hot spare" is a give away

[Khyber]

I have. Apparently you've never built and tested RAID 1 *MIRRORED* drive arrays, before.

Re:"Hot spare" is a give away

[Khyber]

"The spinning drive consumes electricity,"

Who the fuck uses spinning drives now days?

Your shopping lists are for new stuff made TODAY. I can still get SATAII hot-swap drive bays for $10. My old Antec case came with them built-in (and the case was only $90.) Do you not know how to bargain shop?

"Safe in case of a fire?!"

I can tell you have never dealt with computer users whom are smokers. It's really easy - ashtray catches on fire due to negligence/carelessness. No time to unplug the computer tower - just grab the fucking handle of the hot-swap drive, yank, and RUN.

Considering I've tested and demonstrated this scenario multiple times in the past, you'd think someone would've picked up on it by now. I guess you people aren't exactly very smart when it comes to real data safety.

But then again, you're the one advocating off-site backups, which means you don't have full 100% control. No wonder we're having so many data breaches and losses these days - stupid solutions like the one you propose just make it inevitable.

Re:"Hot spare" is a give away

[bobbied]

the little peace of mind it buys

The whole point is, it does not buy you anything. You may as well pray for your data — "just in case".

Late breaking news.... One of my array's drives actually failed yesterday during a routine Antivirus scan... Guess what? My array rebuilt automatically restoring redundancy using the hot standby, all while I was at work and couldn't do a thing about it. No data loss and full redundancy restored w/o any operator interaction. Seems it actually DID buy me something in this case..

Now to start my evil plan of slowly replacing the 1 Gig drives in my array with bigger ones and increasing the available space... One "hot spare" drive at a time.

Re:Hopefully better than their hard drives.

[Highdude702]

Wow ive never had a WD drive fail on me. but have had quite a few Toshiba and Seagate fail. The Seagate Barracuda has to be the worst drive in the world

Re:The first for 60 minutes

[viperidaenz]

Samsung is obviously copying them.

Re:Hopefully better than their hard drives.

[sexconker]

Where's the Data?

Whoops! Deleted

Write-only Disks

Warranty Denied

etc.

Re:Hopefully better than their hard drives.

[50000BTU_barbecue]

Showing my age: Micropolis, Rodime...

PCIe RAID

[labnet]

I'm interested to know what /.ers opinions are on PCIe and RAID.

We run SATA SSDs as RAID1 or RAID6 in our servers and support for PCIe RAID is not great yet.
Are PCIe drives so reliable now, as to not needing RAID?

Re:PCIe RAID

[dmesg0]

Software RAIDs (e.g, md or raidz) don't care if its SATA, SAS or PCIe, they only need the block devices.

Re:PCIe RAID

[swb]

I think the larger problem with nvme RAID is holding enough modules to get any capacity. There's only so many keyed slots. Do they make a 16x PCIe card that will take 4 nvme sticks at a time?

Nvme is wicked fast but it's difficult to get it to scale up in capacity with redundancy because of connectivity limitations. Do they make any cabinets that take nvme modules? Connected via SAS-12 it might not be too bad.

Re:PCIe RAID

[nuckfuts]

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.

Re:PCIe RAID

[dmesg0]

Yes, there are PCIe cards with 4 m.2 slots (e.g. https://www.servethehome.com/the-dell-4x-m-2-pcie-x16-version-of-the-hp-z-turbo-quad-pro/).
And there are plenty of rack servers with internal PCIe switches for up to 24 U.2 (2.5") devices.

Re:PCIe RAID

[colin_faber]

SAS PCIe and software raid is the way to go these days.

Re:PCIe RAID

[swb]

I guess I'm still left wondering how you scale this out to 10s/100s and more terabytes the way you would with 'ordinary' SAS/SATA drives and an expansion bus and enclosures. I would think that at some level of stripe depth with SAS bus flash disk you're getting very large scaling while still delivering throughput and latency competitive with nvme for all but the most corner usage cases.

Re:Warranty Denied

[hackwrench]

Well, I don't know if the warranty is shorter than the industry norm, but my WD external drive that failed was replaced under warranty, and my laptop's internal WD drive got replaced under a non-Western Digital warranty. My laptop was purchased as a returned item from Best Buy.

Re: Hopefully better than their hard drives.

[Applehu Akbar]

"or back in the day when it was called a Winchester."

In my mainframe days, the Winchester was 'the drive that won the West.'

Re:Warranty Denied

[K. S. Kyosuke]

under a non-Western Digital warranty

So, an African Digital warranty? Or Asian Digital warranty?

Re: Warranty Denied

[K. S. Kyosuke]

? I don't have a childhood photo album.

Re:Hopefully better than their hard drives.

[fnj]

Rodime

Oy vey. That brought back memories. I still have one sitting on a shelf, monument to failure. Beautiful elegant-looking trash.

Re:WD = Best HDD's I ever bought 1991-today

[allo]

WD drives hold my hosts file and the access is very very fast, much faster than adblock!

Re:Hopefully better than their hard drives.

[Lawrence_Bird]

RAID != backup Please try to remember that kids. It has its place but don't be fool enough to think RAID will save you. RAID is perfectly happy to copy corrupt data until the bad drive is marked as failed. RAID is really only useful when a drive goes immediately from ON and working properly to OFF and dead.

Re:Hopefully better than their hard drives.

[cusco]

I've seen WD go through waves of quality control issues over the years. For a couple of years I wouldn't touch one except under duress, then they got good again. Then crap, then good, wash, rinse, repeat. Where they are in the cycle now I don't know.

Re:Hopefully better than their hard drives.

[DarkVader]

I've got one that finally failed after over 20 years in service. Most reliable drive I've ever had, that Rodime.

The funny thing is that it was recalled a few months after I got it, Apple wanted to replace it with a Seagate. After two bad drives out of the box, I told the dealer I'd keep the Rodime.

No, the Apple IIgs it was connected to wasn't being used much by the time that drive finally died, but it was still annoying. The computer still works, it's over 30 years old now.

Re:Hopefully better than their hard drives.

[bobbied]

They all fail.. It's just a matter of time...

When you run junk like I have, plan for failure or don't expect to keep your data..

Re:The first for 60 minutes

[tonywong]

Damn that Samsung copies everything so fast!