Western Digital Starts shipments of 96-layer 3D QLC NAND - capacity of 1.33 Tb
Western Digital Corp today announced successful development of its second-generation, four-bits-per-cell architecture for 3D NAND. Implemented for the company’s 96-layer BiCS4 device, the QLC technology delivers the industry’s highest 3D NAND storage capacity of 1.33 terabits (Tb) in a single chip.
BiCS4 was developed at the joint venture flash manufacturing facility in Yokkaichi, Japan with our partner Toshiba Memory Corporation. It is sampling now and volume shipments are expected to commence this calendar year beginning with consumer products marketed under the SanDisk brand. The company expects to deploy BiCS4 in a wide variety of applications from retail to enterprise SSDs.
Basically, this type of NAND thus writes 4 bits per cell. Adding more bits per cell also has an effect on the life-span of the NAND cell, and thus that brings down the number of times it can be written. Much like TLC (Triple-level cell) many new technologies like error-correction mechanisms and wearing have increased the life-span of the respective SSDs. For example, a 500 GB TLC based SSD can quite easily manage a 300TB written before NAND cells start to die off. TLC has roughly a 1000 PE cycles, that is lower for QLC. However, the competition (Toshiba) already managed to achieve a 1000 P/E cycles.
It will not be a fast SSD though as QLC is slower than TLC as it needs to write that cell four times, but with so many channels something probably will compensate for that somewhere.
“Leveraging Western Digital’s silicon processing, device engineering and system integration capabilities, the QLC technology allows 16 distinct levels to be sensed and utilized for storing data,” said Dr. Siva Sivaram, executive vice president, Silicon Technology and Manufacturing at Western Digital. “BiCS4 QLC is our second generation four-bits-per-cell device, and it builds on the learnings from our QLC implementation in 64-layer BiCS3. With the best intrinsic cost structure of any NAND product, BiCS4 underscores our strengths in developing flash innovations that allow our customers’ data to thrive across retail, mobile, embedded, client and enterprise environments. We expect the four-bits-per-cell technology will find mainstream use in all these applications.”
Western Digital shuts down factory for hard drives, opens one for SSDs - 07/18/2018 01:52 PM
While there always remains a user-base for traditional mechanical hard drives, the trend obviously is NAND storage. Western Digital will be closing a production facility in Malaysia, this year alrea...
Western Digital Adds 12TB Model HDD to Purple Line - 06/19/2018 05:24 PM
Western Digital Corporation has expanded its surveillance portfolio with the introduction of the industry's highest capacity, deep-learning-capable, surveillance-class drive, Western Digital Purple 1...
Western Digital unveils Black 3D NVMe M2 SSD - 04/05/2018 04:22 PM
Western Digital today introduced the new Black 3D NVMe SSD. These units offer Sequential read (up to 3,400 MB/s for 1TB and 500GB model) and write performance up to 2,8001MB/s for the 1TB model....
Western Digital moves away from the HGST branding - 03/19/2018 08:36 AM
WD will be phasing out the HGST branding, perhaps not the best move? HGST HDDs gained much popularity due to strong reliability. The first move is the name change of the Western Digital Ultrastar D...
Western Digital Launches PC SN720 and PC SN520 NVMe SSDs - 02/26/2018 06:03 PM
Western Digital Corporation today announced two new NVMe SSDs - Western Digital PC SN720 and Western Digital PC SN520 - powered by a new NVMe storage architecture....
Senior Member
Posts: 813
Joined: 2009-11-30
related news: https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/western-digital-shuts-down-factory-for-hard-drives-opens-one-for-ssds.422085
With QLC I guess we coming closer to line where it could cheaper for datacenters to have SSD instead of HDD. HDD could still be used for backups, not active machines that work 24/7.
HDDs does fail more frequently (in my experience), have movement parts, consumes more energy, requires more cooling and takes more space. I am not mentioning the performance here.
So once we weight all risks and additional costs HDD will bring, it actually might not be a bad idea to have SSD instead. The only moving parts left in servers are cooling.
i wonder are there any data-center start moving out from HDD and start deploying/replacing to full SSD yet ?
the limited write-cycle seems one of the concern for data-center, which why SSD designed for data-center still expensive
i read somewhere that google using DRAM+HDD, so SSD unnecessary
Senior Member
Posts: 6073
Joined: 2011-01-02
I think most HDD would fail before SDD reaching its write cycle limit.
Senior Member
Posts: 1788
Joined: 2013-06-04
I think the appeal for an SSD is not storage at all. The access times and R/W speed as always been the number 1 factors for me.
My best friend was not convinced by 256Gb drives but I bought one as a boot drive: best purchase I've made since my 2500k. In the future I'll probably buy a 512Gb SSD and move this one to my mothers computer as a boot drive.
Large capacity is only worth it for work on workstations, if you do allot of video editing with 4k content, etc.
Senior Member
Posts: 1639
Joined: 2009-01-21
Well until I can get a 2+ tb ssd for under $100, I wont be switching to ssd's for storage any time soon. It will happen eventually though, cant argue with that!