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Guru3D.com » News » Western Digital Starts shipments of 96-layer 3D QLC NAND - capacity of 1.33 Tb

Western Digital Starts shipments of 96-layer 3D QLC NAND - capacity of 1.33 Tb

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 07/20/2018 07:25 AM | source: | 9 comment(s)
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.”

 







« Middle-earth: Shadow of War Demo Available · Western Digital Starts shipments of 96-layer 3D QLC NAND - capacity of 1.33 Tb · Corning announces Gorilla Glass 6 »

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sverek



Posts: 6074
Joined: 2011-01-02

#5566575 Posted on: 07/20/2018 09:05 AM
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.

Silva
Senior Member



Posts: 1401
Joined: 2013-06-04

#5566610 Posted on: 07/20/2018 12:31 PM
33% more density, at the cost of 3x of the cycles. No thanks.

JamesSneed
Senior Member



Posts: 1127
Joined: 2017-02-14

#5566623 Posted on: 07/20/2018 01:43 PM
33% more density, at the cost of 3x of the cycles. No thanks.


If cheap enough QLC drives should make a good secondary storage drive like for media or backups.

Silva
Senior Member



Posts: 1401
Joined: 2013-06-04

#5566638 Posted on: 07/20/2018 02:40 PM
If cheap enough QLC drives should make a good secondary storage drive like for media or backups.

How about long term reliability if powered down? I think you can lose your data if you don't power it up from time to time. But I'm not sure about that.
PS: The price will probably not go down as we might hope. It will probably stay the same as TLC and go down slowly with time.

Fox2232
Senior Member



Posts: 11508
Joined: 2012-07-20

#5566649 Posted on: 07/20/2018 03:11 PM
How about long term reliability if powered down? I think you can lose your data if you don't power it up from time to time. But I'm not sure about that.
PS: The price will probably not go down as we might hope. It will probably stay the same as TLC and go down slowly with time.
Prices are going down on daily basis...
New ADATA XPG GAMMIX S11 SSD 480GB is pretty fast and undercuts competition. I sense Disturbance In The Force.

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