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Micron Launches First QLC NAND SSD

Accepted submission by takyon at 2018-05-24 16:57:50
Hardware

Intel and Micron's jointly-developed 3D QLC (4 bits per cell) NAND memory is featured in a new Micron enterprise SSD, the 5210 ION [anandtech.com]. The drive will have a capacity of 1.92 TB, 3.84 TB, or 7.68 TB, and a write endurance of less than 1 drive write per day (possibly as low as 0.1 DWPD):

The cost reduction brought by QLC NAND is a much-awaited advance for enterprise storage. Most NAND flash manufacturers have started sampling QLC NAND within the past year, generally built on the same 64-layer 3D NAND processes that current-generation TLC NAND uses. Micron has previously shown wafers of 512Gb 64-layer QLC when announcing the addition of QLC to their roadmap [anandtech.com], but today they are also announcing a 1Tb 64L QLC part—the first 1Tb memory chip to hit commercial availability. That 1Tb part is organized as four planes that can be processing I/O commands in parallel, compared to two planes for previous Intel/Micron NAND parts. This helps offset most of the performance loss associated with increasing per-die capacity. Thanks to the "CMOS under the array" design of Intel/Micron 3D NAND, the extra peripheral circuitry requried by doubling the number of planes doesn't add much to the overall die size.

It was initially feared that QLC write endurance would be low enough that drives would need to be treated more or less as write-once, read-many (WORM) devices, requiring careful handling on the software side. With multiple manufacturers now rating their QLC NAND for around 1k P/E cycles, it is clear that QLC-based SSDs aren't too fragile and can handle many existing workloads without needing major software changes to reduce writes.

Micron is primarily marketing the 5210 ION SSDs as replacement for hard drives, rather than replacements for any existing tier of enterprise SSD products. In this role, the 5210 ION will have clear advantages in density (with 2-8TB per 2.5" drive) and performance. QLC NAND only provides incremental improvements to cost, so the 5210 ION won't be matching 7200RPM hard drives for price per GB, but 10k RPM drives will probably be feeling the pressure, especially from TCO calculations that take into account the power efficiency advantages of SSDs.

The next generation of Intel/Micron 3D NAND will have 96 layers, potentially using string-stacking [soylentnews.org] to combine two 48-layer dies. After that, Intel and Micron will go their separate ways [hpcwire.com].


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