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.]
Related Stories
Update: Western Digital announced its acquisition of SanDisk on Wednesday for $86.50 per share, or about $19 billion.
Bloomberg reports that hard disk drive maker Western Digital (WD) is considering purchasing SanDisk Corp. for between $80 and $90 a share, or around $17-18 billion.
A merger would give WD access to SanDisk's NAND flash chip foundry deal with Toshiba and make WD an instant competitor in the solid-state drive market. As we reported last week, SanDisk is also partnering with Hewlett-Packard on Storage-Class Memory (SCM), a post-NAND competitor to Intel and Micron's 3D XPoint offering.
After three years of delay, Chinese trade regulator MOFCOM has approved WD's integration with HGST. The two businesses will be required to keep product brands and sales teams separate for two more years, but can begin "combining operations and sharing technology," such as HGST's helium-filled 7-platter hard drives. $400 million in annual operating expenses could be reduced by the integration.
WD can be expected to include helium-filled hard drives in its product lineup imminently. If WD merges with SanDisk, we may also see the inclusion of more large NAND flash caches in the form of hybrid hard drive (HHD/SSHD) products. The Xbox One Elite Bundle ships with a 1 terabyte SSHD, and Seagate recently released a 4 terabyte desktop SSHD.
It's not all good news for Western Digital this week. Security researchers have just disclosed multiple vulnerabilities in WD's "My Passport" and "My Book" self-encrypting hard drives that allow encryption to be bypassed.
Western Digital's acquisition of SanDisk has received regulatory approval from the Chinese Ministry of Commerce:
Western Digital announced the $19 billion SanDisk acquisition in October 2015 and that its shareholders approved the acquisition in March 2016, which left MOFCOM (the Chinese Ministry of Commerce) approval as the only remaining barrier to the merger. WD announced today that it has received regulatory approval from MOFCOM to proceed, and the transaction closes on May 12--a scant two days away. SanDisk is one of the early leaders of NAND development and holds over 5,000 patents, but broader management issues led to a dramatic weakening of the company's prospects last year. The resultant crash of SanDisk's stock price opened the door for WD to step in and purchase the company.
WD's absorption of SanDisk will be happening as the company continues to keep its acquired former hard disk competitor HGST at arm's length for another two years (a MOFCOM requirement).
Previously:
Western Digital Acquires SanDisk, MyPassport 256-bit AES Encryption "Useless"
Western Digital, SanDisk, and the NAND Market
The wide adoption of 3D/vertical NAND with increased feature sizes and endurance will apparently lead to the introduction of low-cost QLC (4 bits per cell) NAND. 3D NAND's increased flash cell size and overprovisioning will counteract the reduction in endurance caused by moving from 3 to 4 bits per cell:
We covered the TSV [Through Silicon Vias] notion here and now take a look at quadruple level cell (QLC) flash technology. Toshiba will present on this and TSVs in a keynote session at the August 6-9 Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara. The session abstract notes: "New technologies such as QLC (Quadruple Level Cell) BiCS FLASH offer high density, low-cost solutions, while TSV (Through Silicon Via) NAND offers high performance with significant power reduction."
To recap, BiCS stands for Bit Cost Scalable and is Toshiba and flash foundry partner WDC's approach to 3D NAND, the layering of ordinary or planer (2D) NAND chips atop each other. We have 48-layer cells in production and 64-layer ones coming with 96-layer and even 128-layer chips in prospect. Progress beyond 64-layers has problems due to the difficulties in etching holes through the layers and so the TSV idea is to have two layers of layering: two 64-layer chips one on top of the other, with holes through them both, TSVs, for wiring to hold them together and carry out cell activity functions as well.
[...] Back in March, Jeff Ohshima, a Toshiba executive, presented on TSVs and QLC flash at the Non-Volatile Memory Workshop and suggested 88TB QLC 3D NAND SSDs with a 500 write cycle life could be put into production. The Flash Memory Summit keynote could add more colour to this.
Related:
Toshiba and SanDisk Announce 48-Layer 256 Gb 3D NAND
Toshiba Brings Through-Silicon Vias to NAND Flash
Western Digital, SanDisk, and the NAND Market
"String-Stacking" Being Developed to Enable 3D NAND With More Than 100 Layers (NAND devices with 64 layers and above will be difficult to create, so stacking 48-layer devices will be used to increase density)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 20 2015, @07:46PM
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
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
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
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.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Friday November 20 2015, @08:50PM
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
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
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"
(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.