Samsung working on 160-layer or even higher ultra-stacked NAND

[AndreiArgeanu]

Quote

Samsung Electronics is developing 7th generation V-NAND flash memory with 160 layer or higher, reports Korean ETNews. The number of layers is the most within the industry. There will be more uses to NAND flash memory, which stores data, as the number of layers increases which then leads to greater capacity. Chinese semiconductor company called YMTC recently announced its plan to mass-produce 128-layer NAND flash memory by the end of this year, Samsung Electronics is already preparing for the next generation.

https://www.techpowerup.com/266008/samsung-developing-160-layer-3d-nand-flash-memory

https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/samsung-working-on-160-layer-or-even-higher-ultra-high-stacked-nand.html

I'd imagine with Samsung working on 160 layer technology right now we should hopefully get the technology on the consumer market in 2021 with SSD's of higher capacities than ever before. Maybe with these advancements we could possibly be soon on the way of SSD's reaching the high capacity that hard drives have nowadays but also we could be looking at the price of smaller ssd's being cut down as this technology is released.

[Windows9]

Hopefully they start mass producing soon as SSD prices are shooting up

[LiamApex]

4 minutes ago, AMD1234 said:

Hopefully they start mass producing soon as SSD prices are shooting up

Agreed. Nand is getting hella expencive again... i genuinly cannot wait for the day where we can have a 5tb ssd for a reasonable price. i think it exites me more than GPU/CPU progression.

[leadeater]

Larger cheaper SSDs

[TVwazhere]

58 minutes ago, AMD1234 said:

Hopefully they start mass producing soon as SSD prices are shooting up

Man this just goes to show how much I havent been paying attention to prices of things at all. And Also glad I got the 1TB 860 EVO for Christmas

Spoiler

Crucial P1 1TB M.2

 

Samsung 860 Evo 1TB 2.5"

 

Samsung 860 Evo 500GB 2.5"

[RejZoR]

I'm suspecting we're gonna get 6TB Samsung SSD's at around 400-450€ price point replacing current 4TB QVO models at same price point, 4TB, 2TB and 1TB will also drop in price significantly, basically halving current prices.

[yian88]

2TB PCIE-x4 4.0 160 Layer SSD for 100$ on my next laptop with a ryzen 4000 8c/16t, 16gb RAM, yes please. When? will we ever experience the same growth as we did from 90's to 2020's? where we had couple MB of ram and storage to tens of GB RAM and TB storage? It seems like the RAM capacity is stagnating for the past 10+ years, i mean HDD storage has increased significantly, SSD have seen amazing growth making HDD's irrelevant, but high RAM capacities are nowhere to be seen, RAM is as expensive per GB as it ever was :( i thought we would have 32/64GB budget Laptops by now yet here we are can barely get 8GB on a 500$ laptop :(

[Techstorm970]

6 minutes ago, yian88 said:

2TB PCIE-x4 4.0 160 Layer SSD for 100$ on my next laptop with a ryzen 4000 8c/16t, 16gb RAM, yes please. When? will we ever experience the same growth as we did from 90's to 2020's? where we had couple MB of ram and storage to tens of GB RAM and TB storage? It seems like the RAM capacity is stagnating for the past 10+ years, i mean HDD storage has increased significantly, SSD have seen amazing growth making HDD's irrelevant, but high RAM capacities are nowhere to be seen, RAM is as expensive per GB as it ever was i thought we would have 32/64GB budget Laptops by now yet here we are can barely get 8GB on a 500$ laptop

1. 2TB PCIe SSD for $100 is still 2+ years away.  Not in 2021, probably 2022 or 2023.

2. RAM space is not as important as it used to be in the consumer market.  We don't have 16GB RAM budget laptops because most people won't use even close to that much.  Hell, 8GB is still good enough for AAA games in many cases!

 

Where RAM has advanced at a good clip is speed.  Standard DDR3 speed went from 1066 to 1866 in 5+ years.  Standard DDR4 has increased from 2133 to 3200 and counting in 4 years.  This is because CPUs, for both Intel and AMD, have quickly become far more reliant on the speed of the memory they are paired with.  (In 2016, RAM speed was largely meaningless to your typical types of consumers.)

 

And the upcoming DDR5 is so ridiculous in all aspects that not even DATACENTERS can justify it anytime soon.

[RejZoR]

If you ant fast and cheap, SATA is still a good option unless you really need raw sequential speeds and hate extra cables.

[Doobeedoo]

Nice. I wish to see them lower price on the Pro lineup, that'd great.

 

Also would like to see consumer version of their Z-SSD too.

[TechyBen]

9 hours ago, TVwazhere said:

Man this just goes to show how much I havent been paying attention to prices of things at all. And Also glad I got the 1TB 860 EVO for Christmas

  Hide contents

Crucial P1 1TB M.2

 

Samsung 860 Evo 1TB 2.5"

 

Samsung 860 Evo 500GB 2.5"

Not too bad, just picked up an 860 EVO for just over £100 (If it arrives and is legit ) and prices don't seem to have doubled yet. £/$20-40 difference between sales/supply and demand spikes kinda happens with PC hardware... but if it goes on, it may hit the... (sees $180/$200 at the end of the graph) oh... whoops!

[StDragon]

I'm thinking this might (in theory) change the dynamic of density to performance ratio. The more layers you have, the greater the possibility of thermal throttling from heat-soaking an area of the chip. The heat has to go. More layers = more insulative properties, no? Meaning, you can get SSDs down on a cost per GB, but that could also reduce the throughput per chip too. But if we're talking about needing pure performance, I'm sure those drives will be specced out with multiple chips in parallel. For the latest mobile phone, it's a non-issue.

[leadeater]

28 minutes ago, StDragon said:

I'm thinking this might (in theory) change the dynamic of density to performance ratio. The more layers you have, the greater the possibility of thermal throttling from heat-soaking an area of the chip. The heat has to go. More layers = more insulative properties, no? Meaning, you can get SSDs down on a cost per GB, but that could also reduce the throughput per chip too. But if we're talking about needing pure performance, I'm sure those drives will be specced out with multiple chips in parallel. For the latest mobile phone, it's a non-issue.

NAND chips don't mind heat too much, you're actually supposed to run them warm. You can also reduce heights between layers and the extra silicon package height. As long as the flash chips aren't running at like 90C and above you're pretty much fine.

 

Quote

NAND is subject to two competing factors relative to temperature. At high temperature, programming and erasing a NAND cell is relatively less stressful to its structure, but data retention of a NAND cell suffers. At low temperature, data retention of the NAND cell is enhanced but the relative stress to the cell structure due to program and erase operations increases.

 

The effects of temperature apply in varying degrees to all NAND devices from all NAND vendors. Industrial temperature rated NAND devices from the manufacturer are tested for functionality at temperatures of -40˚C and +85˚C (depending on the NAND manufacturer’s specification), but that does not give these parts higher endurance or greater immunity to the effect of charge de-trapping. Sensitivities to these factors appear to be increasing as NAND process geometries shrink, but the actual endurance and data retention characteristics of a particular NAND device will vary between NAND manufacturers, process materials, and geometries.

https://www.eeweb.com/profile/eli-tiomkin/articles/industrial-temperature-and-nand-flash-in-ssd-products

[realpetertdm]

samsung be stackin'

[StDragon]

19 minutes ago, comander said:

Caching heirarchies really is the solution to preformance. 

The point is flash is reaching greater densities regardless if you use tiered storage or all solid state.

 

I think this technology will really help scale EDSFF (Enterprise & Datacenter SSD Form Factor) arrays.

 

From Intel - "EDSFF drives were designed to optimize capacity per drive. With 36 media sites on the E1.L this drive can scale to higher capacities without expensive and complex die stacking. The Intel SSD E1.L will scale up to 30.72TB of capacity in 2019 Using the 30.72TB E1.L form factor, you will be able to reach nearly 1PB of storage in 1U This provides up to 10 times rack consolidation compared to 8TB U.2 15mm drives.

[leadeater]

37 minutes ago, StDragon said:

you will be able to reach nearly 1PB of storage in 1U This provides up to 10 times rack consolidation compared to 8TB U.2 15mm drives.

I'd say first world problems but like damn, pretty sure this is higher than that lol. Wouldn't know what to do with the rest of our racks, storage lockers?

[StDragon]

32 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I'd say first world problems but like damn, pretty sure this is higher than that lol. Wouldn't know what to do with the rest of our racks, storage lockers?

I know that co-locating space in a data-center gets expensive. So for Fortune 500's, it starts to make financial sense to consolidate hardware into less U's. It's why blades are still a viable solution even if they have performance limitations.

[Brooksie359]

7 hours ago, comander said:

To those craving huge storage that's fast... 

 

Build a NAS. Set up cache/ARC. Share across multiple systems. 

 

Caching heirarchies really is the solution to preformance. 

But if it is in a NAS is it fast enough to run game off of? I want a large amount of storage to keep games on because damn are games big these day and even with 2 tb I can only keep a small portion of the games that I have in my library that I actually like. 

[leadeater]

6 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

But if it is in a NAS is it fast enough to run game off of? I want a large amount of storage to keep games on because damn are games big these day and even with 2 tb I can only keep a small portion of the games that I have in my library that I actually like. 

Yea HDD NAS's can be very fast even in IOPs but realistically if you're not crossing 10TB the extra cost and maintenance of a NAS I don't think is that beneficial over local SSD. Even if you have to split your library across 2 or 3 SSDs it's a nice simple solution.

 

I have all my games installed on my NAS/server and it works great but I wouldn't say better than using local storage. The only area where I get a real benefit is in reinstalling my OS or attaching the library to another computer so I don't have to backup the game installs or re-download them.

 

Also I'd be recommending 4 or more HDDs too which means unless you have a lot of data you'll have a ton of unused capacity if your needs are below 10TB.

[Dylanc1500]

7 hours ago, leadeater said:

I'd say first world problems but like damn, pretty sure this is higher than that lol. Wouldn't know what to do with the rest of our racks, storage lockers?

Fill it with pure Optane caching servers for low latency game caching for the IT department?

[Teddy07]

Interesting, might use it in my seminar paper

[CarlBar]

2 minutes ago, Dylanc1500 said:

Fill it with pure Optane caching servers for low latency game caching for the IT department?

 

Not much use with all the staff working from home right now.

[Curufinwe_wins]

9 hours ago, comander said:

To those craving huge storage that's fast... 

 

Build a NAS. Set up cache/ARC. Share across multiple systems. 

 

Caching heirarchies really is the solution to preformance. 

For extreme cost sure. Though I also don't really think it makes sense to run game libraries off NAS regardless unless you have 5/10 GbE wired throughout your house AND have multiple devices you want to access that data, since otherwise it makes more sense to use local storage when sata ssds are still plenty fast (and latency) and a 4TB QVO is only 500 dollars ish (not going to build a NAS worth the effort for that price). I think storing everything other than games on a NAS makes more sense personally (documents but video/music media in particular). That is my current setup, though my total storage is still probably less than 10TB in use (the NAS was built in the Haswell Era)

 

7 minutes ago, comander said:

https://www.google.com/search?q=steam+game+off+nas

 

tldr: yes. 

Fair warning, it CAN be more expensive to go this route. Ideally you'd only go this direction if you have HUGE amounts(I'd say 8TB+) of data to store since there are upfront costs (entry level server or a used PC would be required and either a bunch of RAM for ARC and/or an SSD for cache/L2ARC)

Nevermind you addressed it heh

[Curufinwe_wins]

12 minutes ago, comander said:

2.5/5/10G ethernet matters less than the NAS having SSDs or a boatload of RAM to act as a cache to speed up load times. 

 

In a lot of cases, loading 5GB of small files takes longer from a harddrive than 20GB of large files. Having most of the small files in a cache gives you a pretty dramatic speedup since harddrives are "good enough" for large (measured in megabytes) files. 

---

For a lower cost of entry on a desktop (assuming you don't mind noise or care as much about reliability) - 10TB harddrive + 1TB SSD + primocache works wonders. 

So I've actually used (paid for) primocache. It caused serious issues with autosave behaviors in things like Office. 0/10 would never recommend again. I tried to like it. It was not worth the headache at all. And it was super obvious/frustrating when it just didn't address a workload.

 

Anyways, I don't think I'd buy that reasonable cost caching comes close to covering all (or even most) of the small files out there if you tried to run diverse loads like completely different games (I run my own NAS with a moderate-large ARC cache, but still), and just having the bandwidth to load large data sets above the 1GbE 100-110 MBps is pretty important still for modern games. Yes the random ops speeds of SSDs being 100-10000x faster is generally more important, but the not limiting yourself below local HDD peak speeds is also rather impactful (not to mention sanity saving if you actually have a lot of data and ever move it).

[Curufinwe_wins]

Either way though, at a certain data set size, not just for reliability but also for ease of access and cost, NAS is worth doing. Absolutely. I just wouldn't recommend gaming off one (because I think someone that can afford to build a NAS can afford to have sufficient SSD storage locally to keep the library up they actually ever plan on using).... 

 

I do 100% recommend their use for media storage and backups ofc. And maybe if you are a multi-pc household and you can avoid extra data duplication... then I'd think about gaming on one... maybe. Yes it definitely works. But no, it doesn't make sense.