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."

4 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:Hopefully better than their hard drives. by bobbied · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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...

    --
    "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
  3. 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.

  4. Re:Western Digital Still in Business? by Solandri · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.