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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday July 05 2017, @06:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the profit-earnings-ratio dept.

While QLC NAND is predicted to have as low as 100 program/erase cycles (endurance), Toshiba has "targeted" 1000 cycles for its upcoming 3D QLC NAND products:

Toshiba last week announced its first 3D NAND flash memory chips featuring [the] QLC (quadruple level cell) BiCS architecture. The new components feature 64 layers and developers of SSDs and SSD [controllers] have already received samples of the devices, which Toshiba plans to use for various types of storage solutions.

[...] Besides [its] intention to produce 768 Gb 3D QLC NAND flash for the aforementioned devices, the most interesting part of Toshiba's announcement is [the] endurance specification for the upcoming components. According to the company, its 3D QLC NAND is targeted for ~1000 program/erase cycles, which is close to TLC NAND flash. This is considerably higher than the amount of P/E cycles (100 – 150) expected for QLC by the industry over the years. At first thought, it comes across [as] a typo - didn't they mean 100?. But the email we received was quite clear:

- What's the number of P/E cycles supported by Toshiba's QLC NAND?
- QLC P/E is targeted for 1K cycles.

Endurance miracle putting QLC on par with TLC, or idle talk about a product that won't be out for 1-2 years?

[Ed. note: If you're wondering what QLC NAND is, here's a quick primer.]

Additional Coverage: The guru of 3D


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday July 06 2017, @12:52AM (1 child)

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Thursday July 06 2017, @12:52AM (#535483) Journal

    ...and THAT is cemented to the floor. And even if they DO get 1K P/E cycles out of this, what about storage? Remember that the number of states a cell has to be able to encode varies as 2^X where X is how many "levels" the cell has. It takes a lot less electron migration to go from 1111 to 1110 (QLC, 2^4 or 16) than it does to go from 111 to 110 (TLC, 2^3 or 8), which in turn takes less than to go from 11 to 10 (MLC, 2^2 or 4), and less still than 1 to 0 (SLC, 2^1 or 2).

    This is why I'm sceptical of the "great for archive/low-write loads!" claim. Especially if they're all packed together like herring in the barrel in some hot 2U rack somewhere.

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Thursday July 06 2017, @11:34AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday July 06 2017, @11:34AM (#535668) Journal

    Packed in a rack has to be better for data retention than baked in a USB stick/pen drive (and then thrown into the washing machine along with your jeans).

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