Intel Reveals Single-Package BGA 1TB SSD

[Bit_Guardian]

14 minutes ago, leadeater said:

32 for a product you can buy now and for some time. 16 for a product you cant buy and only exists in a lab. If you want to compare lab to lab you have Intel 1TB BGA and Samsung 4TB BGA, Samsung's is bigger and will still have good performance as it's designed for SAS 12GB devices.

 

Oh and Intel's won't be MLC it'll be TLC like all other large package products and like the 600p is they are comparing in to in the image. MLC in sizes this large just isn't required for performance or durability, needing MLC is old thinking for 80GB-480GB SSDs.

Samsung hasn't started selling them as far as I'm aware, so no, you can't buy them for the time being.

 

And Samsung does not have a 4TB BGA.

 

And nope, it's MLC according to Micron.

[leadeater]

17 minutes ago, Bit_Guardian said:

Samsung hasn't started selling them as far as I'm aware, so no, you can't buy them for the time being.

They started selling at the start of the year and were general availability to anyone mid way through the year, the links provided say that. Google it now if you like and buy one off CDW if you have the $$$ 

[leadeater]

57 minutes ago, Bit_Guardian said:

And nope, it's MLC according to Micron.

 

Quote

With the second generation 3D NAND, Micron is shifting their strategy slightly by offering at least two different die sizes. We've previously heard about the 512Gb 64-layer 3D TLC part, but Micron will also be making a smaller 256Gb 3D TLC part.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/11100/micron-2017-analyst-conference-roadmap-updates-forecasts-and-ceo-retiring

 

Micron isn't the only one with 64-layer BICS 3D NAND and they are all TLC, Toshiba/WD is using the same technology.

[leadeater]

32 minutes ago, Bit_Guardian said:

And Samsung does not have a 4TB BGA.

You should really read your own thread, this is the third time I've linked this here 

 

Quote

Samsung's SSD announcements based on the above V-NAND technologies include a 128TB 2.5" SAS SSD based on QLC V-NAND. For this drive, Samsung will be stacking 32 dies per package, for a total of 4TB in each BGA device.

 

Quote

Samsung has now also announced their fifth-generation V-NAND, which will increase the layer count further to 96 layers with relatively few other changes to the design. The fifth generation will include Samsung's first QLC NAND flash (four bits per cell), with a capacity of 1Tb (128GB) per die

 https://www.anandtech.com/show/11703/samsung-at-flash-memory-summit-96layer-vnand-mlc-znand-new-interfaces

 

It's Samsung, you should expect that they are ahead of everyone else because they are and have been for ages.

[leadeater]

42 minutes ago, Bit_Guardian said:

Samsung hasn't started selling them as far as I'm aware, so no, you can't buy them for the time being.

 

23 minutes ago, leadeater said:

They started selling at the start of the year and were general availability to anyone mid way through the year, the links provided say that. Google it now if you like and buy one off CDW if you have the $$$ 

 

Actually I'll be kind and give you even better proof you can buy them, here is a picture of them in our racks. Check the meta data of the photos if you don't believe me, should be intact unless the forum removes it.

 

 

[Bit_Guardian]

29 minutes ago, leadeater said:

 

 

Actually I'll be kind and give you even better proof you can buy them, here is a picture of them in our racks. Check the meta data of the photos if you don't believe me, should be intact unless the forum removes it.

 

 

 

 

I just checked all over CDW, and the biggest I can find is Samsung's 15.36TB drive, which is not based off of 4TB packages.

[leadeater]

9 minutes ago, Bit_Guardian said:

I just checked all over CDW, and the biggest I can find is Samsung's 15.36TB drive, which is not based off of 4TB packages.

Where did I say the 4TB BGA was in an actual product? Both the Intel 1TB BGA and Samsung 4TB BGA are not in any products on the market right now.

 

Edit:

To be clear as to what was being said you were knocking back a real Samsung product that you can actually buy now by saying it isn't as good as Intel by comparing a BGA package that only exists in a lab.

 

6 hours ago, Bit_Guardian said:

BICS 3D is MLC or TLC (2 or 3 bits per cell) depending on the config. And there are only 16 dies in Intel's package, not 32. 

 

So yes the Intel 1TB BGA only uses 16 dies and the Samsung uses 32 but you are comparing lab to retail product. If you want to go down the path of what Intel has in the lab then you can't ignore the 4TB BGA Samsung has in it's lab.

[leadeater]

@Bit_Guardian

Don't get me wrong I'm not trying to knock down what Intel or Micron is doing, it's actually great to have 1TB BGA packages coming out to market and more NAND production in all areas, you just need to be aware of what the other players in the market are doing otherwise you think something is amazing and revolutionary which in fact it just isn't. This 1TB BGA isn't some big leap forward in technology that surpasses what everyone else had, like when 3D NAND came out, it's just a generational improvement on what they had.

 

The same 64-layer BICS 3D NAND is being used by Toshiba and Western Digital, slightly different to Micron but the package sizes are the same.

Quote

Toshiba and Western Digital use what they refer to as Bit Cost Scaling (BiCS) technology, though the actual variations between this approach and the V-NAND manufactured by Samsung are unclear. Both Samsung and WD/Toshiba use charge-trap flash as opposed to a floating-gate — Micron is the only 3D NAND manufacturer using a floating-gate structure at this point in time.

 

[Bit_Guardian]

2 hours ago, leadeater said:

Where did I say the 4TB BGA was in an actual product? Both the Intel 1TB BGA and Samsung 4TB BGA are not in any products on the market right now.

 

Edit:

To be clear as to what was being said you were knocking back a real Samsung product that you can actually buy now by saying it isn't as good as Intel by comparing a BGA package that only exists in a lab.

 

 

So yes the Intel 1TB BGA only uses 16 dies and the Samsung uses 32 but you are comparing lab to retail product. If you want to go down the path of what Intel has in the lab then you can't ignore the 4TB BGA Samsung has in it's lab.

Intel's is a retail product launching next month.

[leadeater]

18 minutes ago, Bit_Guardian said:

Intel's is a retail product launching next month.

It's only being announced at CES, actual sale date isn't really known. It's pegged to be for the 600p update/revision or something along those lines which tells us some very important information, it's low performance so anything that uses a single BGA is not going to be fast. I mean that's not unexpected though, no other single package solution is going to be high performance either while based on traditional NAND.

 

However Samsung has two major points that will shed light on the actual market. First they don't actually need to release any new products right now as they address all key areas and lead them and that includes products coming out in the next 6 months from competitors. Second in the article I linked QLC 3D NAND isn't the only thing Sasmung has been working on and it's the last one they will release to market excluding Z-NAND. They are all based on Samsung's 5th generation V-NAND technology which covers eMLC, MLC, TLC and QLC up to 96 layers, up from the current 64 in use now. The eMLC, MLC and TLC 5th generation products are getting ready to ship now/very soon under early partnership programs i.e. cloud providers and general availability will be around the same as last time, around March but likely a month or so later this time.

[Bit_Guardian]

2 hours ago, leadeater said:

It's only being announced at CES, actual sale date isn't really known. It's pegged to be for the 600p update/revision or something along those lines which tells us some very important information, it's low performance so anything that uses a single BGA is not going to be fast. I mean that's not unexpected though, no other single package solution is going to be high performance either while based on traditional NAND.

 

However Samsung has two major points that will shed light on the actual market. First they don't actually need to release any new products right now as they address all key areas and lead them and that includes products coming out in the next 6 months from competitors. Second in the article I linked QLC 3D NAND isn't the only thing Sasmung has been working on and it's the last one they will release to market excluding Z-NAND. They are all based on Samsung's 5th generation V-NAND technology which covers eMLC, MLC, TLC and QLC up to 96 layers, up from the current 64 in use now. The eMLC, MLC and TLC 5th generation products are getting ready to ship now/very soon under early partnership programs i.e. cloud providers and general availability will be around the same as last time, around March but likely a month or so later this time.

It's also for sale in cell phones apparently.

 

And just because it's replacing the 600p doesn't mean the controller isn't being improved. Come on. Give Intel a bare minimum o credit here.

 

And no, I'd argue they have equal quality competitors in SATA SSDs that are now decently cheaper. And no, 96-layer is not coming for a while, June at the earliest.

[leadeater]

13 minutes ago, Bit_Guardian said:

And just because it's replacing the 600p doesn't mean the controller isn't being improved. Come on. Give Intel a bare minimum o credit here.

The controller on the 600p isn't actually that bad, it just lacks enough NAND chips to keep sustained performance and relies on a no DRAM SLC cache design. If you're not trying to compare it to high end NVMe SSDs it's an excellent choice in it's price band. It is competing with the high end SATA SSDs which it beats for the general workload stuff, it only falls down on specific areas where the 850 EVO and Pro takes over but you have to be doing those use cases to care. For your gaming desktop the Intel 600p is a better choice.

 

For me I would buy a high end SATA SSD because I use multiple of them in storage arrays which means I care more about consistency and firmware stability which the 600p doesn't pass muster. Doesn't make the 600p a bad SSD though just not for me.

 

23 minutes ago, Bit_Guardian said:

And no, I'd argue they have equal quality competitors in SATA SSDs that are now decently cheaper. And no, 96-layer is not coming for a while, June at the earliest

You know how I said around March or a month or so after, guess what that is ish? June . It's not going to be later than June considering Samsung was doing all the press for it August this year and there have been no delays or issues to prevent it from coming out when they project it to. It's hard to not sound like I'm putting the other NAND manufacturers down but the truth is Samsung is just further ahead technologically than the rest, you can see that in the above graphic and the below market share.

 

 

As far as equal quality competitors go sort of on a per product basis but not in regards to what's in the SSDs, and cheaper is the evidence to that fact. If you read the professional storage reviews, not Anandtech, for SSDs that do the required testing to actually show differences in SSDs you'll know just how much better Samsung is. The rest are catching up as everyone is edging closer to the technological wall again, everything becomes very samey once technology matures and everyone is on equal footing.

 

http://www.storagereview.com/samsung_sm863_ssd_review

http://www.thessdreview.com/our-reviews/samsung-sm863-pm863-ssd-review-960gb/3/

 

Most of the time the closest competing products to Samsung is it's own last generation of products.

 

1 hour ago, Bit_Guardian said:

It's also for sale in cell phones apparently.

Not yet but likely to see it in them which is great, likely also see them in some really large capacity SATA and SAS SSDs, and high speed USB 3 flash drives maybe?