TechSpot: Toshiba announces 96-layer QLC 3D NAND chips to boost SSD capacities

[AtlasWraith]

Toshiba is doing it big this year with their QLC NAND chips and I am so looking forward to this!

 

TL:DR direct from the article:

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SSDs are a dime a dozen these days. Any meaningful step forward is going to come as a result of either increased performance or increased capacity. Toshiba's latest advancement addresses the latter (and hopefully, not at the expense of the former).

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The 96-layer BiCS 3D NAND chips feature four bits per cell (quad level cell, or QLC). By pushing the bit count for data per memory cell from three to four, Toshiba’s new NAND achieves a maximum capacity of 1.33 terabits for a single chip. A typical 16-die stacked architecture in a single package would have a capacity of 2.66 terabytes, opening the door for large-capacity SSDs in the not-too-distant future.

 

I am thinking this translates to SSD's at 2TB or 4TB for around the same price point as a standard 1TB, but I am sure a price premium will be "available" at lunch and for the next months to come after initial release.

 

Now,

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Western Digital, a partner of Toshiba, said in a separate release that it is now sampling the new NAND and plans to ship consumer products running the chips under the SanDisk brand later this year.

Which suggest that the tech will be consumer ready for the holiday season. That of course could just be wishful thinking and WD might be moving that window to right into 2019.

 

Either way, the biggest thing to take away from this as PC gamers is that once this tech goes live, current SSD prices should see a massive reduction in price, at least I hope. I personally also hope that this brings the 2TB Crusial MX500 or the 2TB 970 EVO to sub 100 USD. That's literally the best case scenario for a pure gaming rig since there's no way gaming performance and load times will really benefit all that much from newer drives. I could be wrong, of course. Thoughts?

 

Source:

https://www.techspot.com/news/75600-toshiba-announces-96-layer-qlc-3d-nand-chips.html

[sazrocks]

Yeah but doesn't QLC NAND suck at endurance?

[The Benjamins]

4 minutes ago, sazrocks said:

Yeah but doesn't QLC NAND suck at endurance?

endurance also scales with size, and current endurance is CRAZY long. so a 2TB drive would last for over 2+PB written to it. If any home user gets past 100TB in 5 years is no ordinary user, I have put 15TB per 512GB drive in my raid 0 over 4-5 years. that is my only storage in my system for most of its life.

[mynameisjuan]

13 minutes ago, sazrocks said:

Yeah but doesn't QLC NAND suck at endurance?

Why do people even care about endurance? Who the hell is writing 100GBs a day?

[rcmaehl]

Looks like they're competing with Samsung 

 

 

[sazrocks]

7 minutes ago, mynameisjuan said:

Why do people even care about endurance? Who the hell is writing 100GBs a day?

Now that I've looked into it more, it seems like (at least for the QLC they revealed last year) the endurance is about 1000 write cycles, which is 10x what I (and by the sounds of it, some other people) expected. That makes these much more usable. I was worried about a cheap 250GB ssd dying after only 25TB of writes.

15 minutes ago, The Benjamins said:

endurance also scales with size, and current endurance is CRAZY long. so a 2TB drive would last for over 2+PB written to it. If any home user gets past 100TB in 5 years is no ordinary user, I have put 15TB per 512GB drive in my raid 0 over 4-5 years. that is my only storage in my system for most of its life.

Depending on the software you have running some people may be racking up insane amounts of writes without knowing it. An example of this is shadowplay: 

Even since I have stopped using shadowplay I have reached over 27TB of writes on my SSD.

 

Forlarger drives however you are correct to say that it becomes less of an issue.

 

[The Benjamins]

7 minutes ago, sazrocks said:

 

Depending on the software you have running some people may be racking up insane amounts of writes without knowing it. An example of this is shadowplay: 

LINK

Even since I have stopped using shadowplay I have reached over 27TB of writes on my SSD.

 

Forlarger drives however you are correct to say that it becomes less of an issue.

 

27 TB over how long?

 

a 120GB 850 evo should last for around 500+TB written and again it scales so a 500 GB 850 evo would be 2+PB.

 

at your current rate how many years do you have left?

[IAnthonyFX]

the real question is how much should we expect it to cost? any ideas? this hits me right when i am in the market for an ssd

[Coaxialgamer]

45 minutes ago, sazrocks said:

Yeah but doesn't QLC NAND suck at endurance?

Compared to other SSD cells , yes . They can only do about 1000 or so PE cycles before dying . But if you think about it ,that's still multiple Petabytes worth of writes for that 2.6TB  NAND flash chip .  That's actually quite a bit , especially when you consider that people don't usually write data to their drive that much compared to how much is read, where damage doesn't occur.

Also , keep in mind rated vs actual endurance statistic . For 2.66 PB of write endurance , that means you could still write roughly 1.5TB to your drive every day , for FIVE YEARS.

 

[sazrocks]

39 minutes ago, The Benjamins said:

27 TB over how long?

 

a 120GB 850 evo should last for around 500+TB written

Where do you see that? Its rated for 75TB, so at current rates I'll run out in 4 years (been about 2 years since I built this PC).

[The Benjamins]

3 minutes ago, sazrocks said:

Where do you see that? Its rated for 75TB, so at current rates I'll run out in 4 years (been about 2 years since I built this PC).

Their was a tech site that did a test on 250gb drives like, Samsung got 1.2PB written before failure. Most got past 800TB

[yian88]

Not gonna happen, they are sandbagging SSD capacities right now just like they price fix RAM, SSD will stay expensive at high capacities for quite a while until something happens in the market.

As for Toshiba's tech, they will definately make premium drives for workstations and servers at 1-2-3+ TB  and sell for premium price, it will probably be 1-2 years down the road after release before competitors come up with something similar and drive prices down 6-12 months after that when they compete in holidays sales/black friday, oversupply etc.

 

Actually im more worried that SATA iii is dead and no replacement being made, there arent even plans or ideas in the works its just dead. NVMe is not advancing fast enough, NVMe should have been the obvious replacement for SATA or at least most board's should already have NVMe ports 1-4 ports and reduce the lanes from southbridge SATA going to the cpu to boost lanes available for NVMe etc.

 

This might sound ridiculous but what would happen if you move HDD to NVMe directly, would HDD gain a little better latency and troughput? i say it would but not worth it, probably why they didnt do it already.

 

[sazrocks]

14 minutes ago, The Benjamins said:

Their was a tech site that did a test on 250gb drives like, Samsung got 1.2PB written before failure. Most got past 800TB

All the tests I can find used pro drives, which have significantly longer endurance.

[vanished]

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SSDs are a dime a dozen these days

Actually they're about a dime a half gig, but hopefully this can bring that down For too long SSDs have been the domain of high performance, but due to their many benefits over HDDs, they would be an improvement even for simple bulk storage.  Problem is they've always been too expensive for this, but perhaps that is about to change.

 

28 minutes ago, yian88 said:

Not gonna happen, they are sandbagging SSD capacities right now just like they price fix RAM, SSD will stay expensive at high capacities for quite a while until something happens in the market.

What is your evidence for this?  If anything, I've seen considerable improvements made in the $/GB space over the last year or so.

28 minutes ago, yian88 said:

This might sound ridiculous but what would happen if you move HDD to NVMe directly, would HDD gain a little better latency and troughput? i say it would but not worth it, probably why they didnt do it already.

It would probably be worse.  The whole point of NVMe was to move away from the previous protocols that were designed and optimized for HDDs and get something that can push SSDs to their limit.

1 hour ago, IAnthonyFX said:

the real question is how much should we expect it to cost? any ideas? this hits me right when i am in the market for an ssd

The best $/GB drive right now is Micron's 1100 2 TB which is just $300 US.  The next closest drive I can find is about the same cost about half that for only 1 TB, and god help you if you go up to 2 TB or more with any other brand.  Considering that's 3D TLC, I'd imagine the newer ones should be noticeably cheaper than that, but no one knows for sure until it happens.

[The Benjamins]

1 hour ago, sazrocks said:

All the tests I can find used pro drives, which have significantly longer endurance.

https://techreport.com/review/24841/introducing-the-ssd-endurance-experiment

https://techreport.com/review/26523/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-casualties-on-the-way-to-a-petabyte

https://techreport.com/review/27062/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-only-two-remain-after-1-5pb/

 

the 840 lasted to 900GB

 

the 2 worst drives, kingstone and intel, lasted to 700GB with the leaders making it to 1.5PB. and this is with 250GB drives. so I would expect your drive to last past 300GB writes, and for these drives with big capacities I don't see a reason to be concerned.

[DocSwag]

I feel like everyone is talking too much about durability. What about write speeds? Those are gonna suffer a ton. And I think capacities are being overstated. QLC offers 33% higher capacity than TLC. So theoretically, if we had a $100 500gb TLC SSD, I'd guess that a 500gb QLC SSD would be around $80-$90 (gotta factor in other costs like controller and dram). The cost savings really aren't that huge and on the lower capacity versions we could see drastically decreased performance and endurance.

[Unixsystem]

On 7/20/2018 at 5:15 PM, The Benjamins said:

https://techreport.com/review/24841/introducing-the-ssd-endurance-experiment

https://techreport.com/review/26523/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-casualties-on-the-way-to-a-petabyte

https://techreport.com/review/27062/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-only-two-remain-after-1-5pb/

 

the 840 lasted to 900GB

 

the 2 worst drives, kingstone and intel, lasted to 700GB with the leaders making it to 1.5PB. and this is with 250GB drives. so I would expect your drive to last past 300GB writes, and for these drives with big capacities I don't see a reason to be concerned.

Keep in mind that that experiment was started in 2013. Even the worst SSDs today are significantly more durable than the ones from 5 years ago, and current high end ones are in a whole other league.

[The Benjamins]

1 minute ago, Waffles13 said:

Keep in mind that that experiment was started in 2013. Even the worst SSDs today are significantly more durable than the ones from 5 years ago, and current high end ones are in a whole other league.

yes that is my point, their is no need to worry about endurance on good drives