Micron have unveiled their new line of 3D NAND, the SATA 6Gbps TLC 1100 and the NVMe MLC 2100, although they only shared details of the former. The 1100 will introduce DEVSLP mode, where the drives power draw will dip to less than 2mW on the smaller drives, 4mW for the 1TB with the 2TB model requiring 25mW. The TLC used in the drive is rather impressive, the advertised speeds come very close to what their MLC based M600 drives are capable of. Check out the full specs and more over at The Register.
"Intel, its flash foundry partner, introduced its own 3D SSDs, MLC (2bits/cell) ones, in March with the DC P3320 and P3520, with maximum capacity of 2TB. These had an NVME interface whereas Micron’s 1100 has the slower 6Gbit/s SATA interface."
Here is some more Tech News from around the web:
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Buried lede: 2TB M.2 SSDs.
Buried lede: 2TB M.2 SSDs. Will these need cooling solutions?
Extra NAND capacity doesn’t
Extra NAND capacity doesn't equate to more heat, since at the same throughput you are simply spreading the writes across more dies.
Does the controller have to
Does the controller have to work that much harder (and consequently get that much hotter)?
Forgive me if that’s a dumb question; I don’t know THAT much about the internal workings of M.2 SSDs, but I’m given to understand that it’s the controller chip that heats up.
Stacked dies means higher
Stacked dies means higher heat density… thus less reliable. 😉
A little late to the party of
A little late to the party of 3D Nand and NVMe. At this point it pretty much everyone trying to catchup to Samsung.
From the Register article
From the Register article that you linked to:
“The 2100 information is so sparse as to be near invisible, making it akin to 3D NAND SSD vapour ware for the time being. It is a client device SSD with up to 1TB capacity in an M.2 form factor. We’re told it has four times the bandwidth of SATA SSDs and a low latency. Really? With NVMe? Who would have thought that!”
What about the data retention problems with the planar TLC based NAND flash memory cells, has doing things more in the 3rd dimension fixed these issues, For any MLC(3)/TLC 3D NAND on these SKUs from Micron?
The one metric that I want to Know about with any MLC(3)/TLC NAND planar, or the more into the 3D stacked NAND variety: is what is the fabrication node size. So how many nanometers for the cell size, and maybe a little extra information for the 3D NAND cell’s actual thickness so there can be some rough estimates as to how many atoms there are dedicated to the storing of the 3 states in the TLC NAND’s cell! For a metric that better estimates the cell’s ability to retain its proper state over time for proper data storage retention and relative performance issues related to the R/W speed degradation issues related to any excessive error correction needed on TLC NAND memory cells.
Note: with fabricaton sizes 14nm and below the actual amount of total atoms dedicated to storage cell size/cell state retention becomes very important!
3D NAND is not particularly
3D NAND is not particularly vaporware. I'm testing a non-V-NAND 3D-NAND equipped SSD right now in fact. They are certainly coming.
These 'data retention problems' you're citing don't have much basis really. The bigger down side to shrinks on 2D are decreases in endurance. Retention for consumer parts conforms to the JEDEC standard of 1 year for a fully worn end-of-life SSD. Anything shorter than that qualifies as a failure, and we haven't seen mass failures like that in this space. Samsung's issue on the 840 EVO doesn't count here because that was more related to a drift-compensation bug that was eventually squashed.
As far as cross section goes, Samsung's V-NAND runs in the 40nm range, while IMFT runs at ~30nm (but is different structurally as they are using floating-gate). The key to 3D is that there is vertical height and more total volume in the cell. For these solutions, endurance pushes into areas where it is mostly no longer a concern. No need to go crazy calculating wall thicknesses to figure out endurance really – there are millions of 850 EVO's out in the wild with no real reports of issues.
“The 2100 information is so
“The 2100 information is so sparse as to be near invisible, making it akin to 3D NAND SSD vapour ware for the time being. It is a client device SSD with up to 1TB capacity in an M.2 form factor. We’re told it has four times the bandwidth of SATA SSDs and a low latency. Really? With NVMe? Who would have thought that!”(from Register article)
That was the Register article writer’s response to Micron’s lack of info on the 2100. So I do not think that he was referring to all 3D NAND just Micron’s lack of information on its 2100 SKU. So 3D NAND can make up for a smaller process node size in the X and Y with and be little bit thicker in the Z(vertical) thickness to give the NAND better storage retention while allowing for denser/higher storage amounts per NAND memory die.
Micron appears to be a little late to the 3D NAND party, but Micron has some 3D Xpoint advantage for maybe a NAND drive with some Xpoint Cache at some future time. It looks like a lot more PCIe lanes may be needed for future systems for SSD/NVM drives, that or PCIe 4.0 will have to be brought online sooner than planned.
That Samsung Postage Stamp size SSD drive chip looks to be the one that will make PCIe 4.0 needed much sooner, or way more PCIe 3.0 lanes made available on motherboards for any devices that can tax a PCIe x4 connector’s available bandwidth, Just 2 of those Samsung SSD’s on a chip could eat up 75%(for reads) of an x4 PCIe 3.0 connector’s provided bandwidth, if my math is correct.
What’s with the 21mW jump
What’s with the 21mW jump between 1 and 2tb?
Speaking of high capacity
Speaking of high capacity module SSDs, has there been any news about Samsung releasing the 2TB mSata, found in the T3, as a standalone product?