Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by CoolHand on Friday November 20 2015, @07:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the flashing-the-future dept.

Following Western Digital's purchase of SanDisk, now is a good time to look to the future of the disk and NAND flash storage industries:

Stifel [Managing Director] Aaron Rakers has taken a deep dive look at the SanDisk technology Western Digital is aiming to buy, and his report brings out cost-savings derived from HGST escaping payment of an Intel tax, 3D NAND timescales, and possibilities for future planar NAND node shrinks.

[...] Rakers points out that "the write attributes of shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technologies requires the usage of non-volatile persistent memory (NAND) in order to optimise write performance (e.g., transition tables)." HGST's 10TB HelioSeal disk drives use SMR and, if Rakers is right, will need to be hybrid flash/disk drives with flash being used for SMR block rewrite operations. SanDisk can supply the flash chips for this.

Unexpectedly, there could be another 2D planar NAND node shrink to below 15nm. Rakers writes: "We believe that SanDisk continues to prepare for the possibility of another planar node shrink (i.e. to 10/12nm); whether the company actually commences a subsequent planar node shrink depends on the cost effectiveness ramp of SanDisk's 3D NAND ... demand for various types of NAND in different use cases, and the difference in investment required to continue to produce 15nm TLC, convert to 3D NAND, build greenfield 3D NAND or further shrink planar."

[...] Raker's financial modelling of WD's post-SanDisk acquisition SSD costs indicates that building products using vertically-integrated SanDisk technology for enterprise SAS SSDs could save WD substantial amounts of money. He thinks that 80-85 per cent of the enterprise SSD bill-of-material (BOM) cost is for NAND flash. Modelling with an average 900GB SSD he reckons WD could be paying Intel as much as $0.60/GB for flash chips. It would save as much as 52 per cent of this by using SanDisk chips.

[More after the break.]

The article provides this list of 3D NAND production dates and plans:

  • Samsung 24-layer 128Gb 3D NAND production started in second half of 2013
  • Samsung has just started shipping 48-layer 3D NAND chips, according to Kaminario
  • Intel/Micron announced 32-layer 256Gb MLC 3D NAND in mid-2015
  • Hynix will start 36-layer 3D NAND production in late-2015
  • Hynix will mass produce 48-layer 3D flash in 2016
  • SanDisk/Toshiba said it would start 48-layer 256Gb 3D NAND, including TLC, ships in September and ramp to volume in 2016

[NOTE: The article had 'GB' (gigaBytes) where 'Gb' (gigabits) should have been; it has been corrected, here. -Ed.]


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 20 2015, @07:46PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 20 2015, @07:46PM (#265935)

    WD needs to get its shit together on quality before worrying about shaving off a few more pennies from production.

  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday November 20 2015, @08:22PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday November 20 2015, @08:22PM (#265954) Journal

    No, they don't. You have two main choices, WD and Seagate. Both have seen plenty of complaints about reliability and will continue to. Toshiba is still making drives apparently. There's also Buffalo.

    WD owns HGST but has had to keep operations separate due to the Chinese antitrust regulator. Those operations are now merging. That will affect their product lines.

    Using your anecdata of WD/Seagate failures is not indicative of future drive failures. It is specific models that do badly, like the Seagate 3 TB ST3000DM001. [extremetech.com] If you want to go by anecdotes, I have heard far less complaints about WD than Seagate. But all HDDs will fail sometime and if that's a problem for your data you need backups or a reliable SSD (another product that can't be judged by models from 2 years ago).

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    • (Score: 2) by Bill Dimm on Friday November 20 2015, @10:46PM

      by Bill Dimm (940) on Friday November 20 2015, @10:46PM (#265994)

      If you want to go by anecdotes...

      I'm not the original poster, but what makes you think he/she is basing the criticism on anecdotes? It looks like the WD failure rate increased a lot in 2015 (see chart at end) [backblaze.com].

      • (Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Friday November 20 2015, @11:41PM

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday November 20 2015, @11:41PM (#266010) Journal

        From your source:

        The Western Digital 1TB drives in use are nearly 6 years old on average. There are several drives with nearly 7 years of service. It wasn’t until 2015 that the failure rate rose above the annual average for all drives. This makes sense given the “bathtub” curve of drive failure where drives over 4 years start to fail at a higher rate. Still the WD 1TB drives have performed well for a long time.

        --
        [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Bill Dimm on Saturday November 21 2015, @01:19AM

          by Bill Dimm (940) on Saturday November 21 2015, @01:19AM (#266035)

          Admittedly, I hadn't realized that they had combined numbers without accounting for drive ages, but...

          There are 474 1TB WD drives with a failure rate that went from 3.90% in 2014 to 9.91% in 2015 shown in the table with an average age of 70 months.
          There are 1085 2TB WD drives with a failure rate at 6.94% in 2014 that went up to 8.79% in 2015 with an average age of 16.3 months.

          Assuming that their final graph combined the numbers with weights proportional to the number of drives of each type, the increase failures of the much larger number of relatively new 2TB drives had almost as much impact as the failures of the old 1TB drives.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Friday November 20 2015, @08:50PM

    by PizzaRollPlinkett (4512) on Friday November 20 2015, @08:50PM (#265968)

    WD is better than Seagate. That's like saying the plague is better than nuclear war, but it's true. I have had more drives fail this year than I've had fail in the past 2 decades, and they were all Seagate. One after the other. And not the usual failing, either, with a few bad sectors you can remap and have time to back up the drive. I mean it made a noise and quit working kind of fail. Some were old Seagates - I thought in 2013 I had enough spare drives on hand to last 5+ years at my old failure rate, and went through the whole stack, and got a new one or two before I completely quit trusting Seagate. Sure, this is anecdotal, but I've been running with WD Black drives ever since, and they at least haven't had the same kind of total, instant failure.

    This is why I hate hate hate hate hate not having a choice. I hate Wal-Mart putting competitors out of business. I hate Amazon putting competitors out of business. I hate mergers and consolidation, because you wake up one day with a Hobson's choice between one or two players who have no incentive to do anything at all for their customers. Since Wal-Mart put other stores out of business in my area, they've stocked fewer products, have empty shelves, and have 2 out of 30 checkouts open. They don't care. I used to use Fujitsu disks, then Maxtor, and finally Seagate. Now Seagate and WD don't care, although I think WD's quality got so awful they had to improve it or go out of business. And so on. I don't like not having competitors in a space that actually compete.

    --
    (E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
    • (Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Friday November 20 2015, @11:21PM

      by dyingtolive (952) on Friday November 20 2015, @11:21PM (#266001)

      Which is odd, because Seagate used to be pretty decent as I recall. Back when I built whitebox computers (admittedly, some 10 years ago) that was exclusively what we used. The Maxtor buyout happened, and we noticed the failure rate within a year or so spike. We eventually figured out that certain models were being fabbed at old Maxtor plants, and so we changed our standard build, and no more issues.

      Nowadays though, I got nothing. Too far removed from that. I just keep an occasional backup of the small amount of stuff I care about and hope for the best.

      --
      Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
  • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday November 23 2015, @05:19PM

    by Freeman (732) on Monday November 23 2015, @05:19PM (#267062) Journal

    I have had more trouble with and heard of more trouble with Seagate drives than Western Digital. I used to get Seagate and was very happy with them. Seagate seems to be in a much more downward spiral than Western Digital. I have also heard nothing, but complaints regarding the "Hybrid" Seagate Drives.

    --
    Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"