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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: 4, Informative) by takyon on Friday November 20 2015, @11:41PM
From your source:
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Bill Dimm on Saturday November 21 2015, @01:19AM
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.