Samsung will use QLC NAND to create a 128 TB SSD:
For now, let's talk about the goods we'll see over the next year. The biggest news to come out of the new Samsung campus is QLC flash. Samsung's customers set performance and endurance specifications and don't care about the underlying technology as long as those needs are met. Samsung says it can achieve its targets with its first generation QLC (4-bits per cell) V-NAND technology.
The first product pre-announcement (it doesn't have a product number yet) is a 128TB SAS SSD using QLC technology with a 1TB die size. The company plans to go beyond 16 die per package using chip stacking technology that will yield 32 die per package, a flash industry record.
NAND revenue has increased 55% in one year.
Previously: Seagate Demonstrates a 60 TB 3.5" SSD
Toshiba Envisions a 100 TB QLC SSD in the "Near Future"
Western Digital Announces 96-Layer 3D NAND, Including Both TLC and QLC
Toshiba's 3D QLC NAND Could Reach 1000 P/E Cycles
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10 2017, @08:03PM (8 children)
...are better be sent to /dev/null straight away. Saves everyone the expense. :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10 2017, @08:11PM (4 children)
Yeah. Might lead to some nice thumb drives eventually but I'll be damned if I'm going to use it as primary storage.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday August 10 2017, @08:17PM (3 children)
If you are expecting to do multiple drive writes per day on a 100+ TB SSD, you can be excused for getting TLC/MLC/SLC instead.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10 2017, @08:26PM (2 children)
No, I'm just expecting any drive of mine to retain the data for more than a day in unpowered state. It's not all cat photos y'know...
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Thursday August 10 2017, @08:43PM (1 child)
JEDEC says data retention should be 1 year for a consumer SSD, after a certain TBW is reached. That should not change with QLC NAND.
https://www.micron.com/about/blogs/2015/may/addressing-data-retention-in-ssds [micron.com]
Then we have claims that QLC endurance is going to be similar to TLC for at least one company (link in the summary).
If the data is important to you, you'll have it backed up somewhere else on non-NAND media.
So yes, you can have two days of unpowered data retention. Maybe even three.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10 2017, @09:04PM
"Should be" usually means one thing: "isn't".
A blog post - which means deniable - from 2015 - which means it covers TLC at best; and what's even better, nowhere does it say that any real drives are built to follow these JEDEC specs. ;)
(Score: 2) by forkazoo on Thursday August 10 2017, @08:20PM (2 children)
If you have 128 TB of it, you can use all sorts of post-RAID erasure coding, .PAR files, and ZFS active FS scrubbing kind of stuff to workaround the fact that it's a per-bit useless cesspit, and wind up with more reliable data overall.
32 TB useable after insane amounts of redundancy vs. 32 GB of "reliable" (Not that reliable anyway) SLC flash seems like a completely sane tradeoff.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10 2017, @08:36PM (1 child)
One SLC flash drive easily retained the data for 10 years, lying on a shelf. Another is still working perfectly after 15 years of everyday use. Makes me doubt you've ever seen a SLC anything up close...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 12 2017, @06:05AM
Flash lifetime is dependent on dozens of factors. Voltage, heat, and usage are the most damaging to flash (in that order). Most flash is fine. The environments I used to deploy into it would last about ~2 years. The laptop I have my current SSD in is going on 5 years now (I even defrag it!). Basically if you abuse the hell out of it well it will not last long. If you treat it nicely it will last a *long* time.