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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: 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!