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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.]
(Score: 2) by Rich on Friday November 20 2015, @09:38PM
While ElReg isn't the worst of sources, all this reads a little bit like a pump & dump scheme, where parties vested in flash try to liven up the market a bit to divest. We've got a new technology coming up, Phase Change Memory, that, in its paper form, completely outclasses flash in the durability department, while apparently easy to manufacture. I won't make any predictions, but it will be interesting to see how that hits the market. It can't be much more expensive than, say, MLC flash, because that is considered "good enough" for all practical commercial purposes, but if it arrives at that price point, it can only improve towards being better than flash, which is slowly coming into an area of diminishing returns on improvements.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday November 20 2015, @10:21PM
From my previous article:
From what analysts have said on El Reg, Intel and Micron's 3D XPoint announcements are definitely bringing post-NAND to enterprise in the next 2 years. Consumers possibly. However they will exist in their own storage tier and coexist with cheap 3D TLC NAND. It will cost 3-10 times more per gigabyte. It has come out that the a main (secret) point of NVM Express was for Intel to pave the way for 3D Xpoint.
What is Storage-Class Memory? I don't think anybody knows. Given HP's involvement, it could be the revived corpse of their memristor technology, or something closer to PCM, given that XPoint has been called/mistaken for PCM and both technologies seem to have similar speeds.
Reg has some good articles on XPoint that I will link... now.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/23/zeroing_in_on_xpoint_memory/ [theregister.co.uk]
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/22/intel_5bn_china_3d_nand_deal/ [theregister.co.uk]
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/23/intel_planned_nvme_for_xpoint/ [theregister.co.uk]
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/03/intels_allflash_data_center/ [theregister.co.uk]
Note that the Intel and Micron relationship seems to be fraying. Or at least the dependence is lessening.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday November 21 2015, @08:44AM
And how many Libraries of Congress can this memory in paper form store?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Rich on Saturday November 21 2015, @01:23PM
1.6 millilibrariesofcongress per chip. You would need 625 of Intel's demonstrator chips to store the content of the books once.