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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Samsung Shares SSD Roadmap for QLC NAND And 96-layer 3D NAND [anandtech.com]

At Samsung's Tech Day event today in San Jose, the company shared their SSD roadmap for transitioning to 96-layer 3D NAND and introducing four bit per cell (QLC) NAND flash memory. Successors have been named for most of their current SSDs that use three bit per cell (TLC) NAND flash and are being updated with 96-layer 3D TLC, and new product lines using QLC NAND have been introduced.

[...] The enterprise SAS product line is not seeing any major changes to performance or available capacities, but the update from the PM1643 to the PM1643a does improve random write performance by about 20%. The largest model remains 30.72TB. The high-end enterprise NVMe drives are getting a major controller update that brings PCIe 4.0 support in addition to the NAND upgrade. This allows for much higher performance across the board, most notably with sequential read speeds reaching 8GB/s on the new PM1733 compared to 3.5GB/s on the PM1723b. The maximum available capacity has caught up to the SAS product line with the introduction of a 30.72TB model.

[...] Samsung also mentioned that in Q2 2019 they are planning to introduce a higher-performing 512Gb QLC die to complement their current 1Tb die. Samsung compared the performance of this new 512Gb die against an unspecified competitor's 1Tb QLC, claiming that Samsung's high-performance QLC will have 37% lower read latency and 45% lower program latency.

[...] The first products featuring the second generation of Samsung's low-latency Z-NAND flash memory will be the SZ1733 and SZ1735, high-end enterprise NVMe SSDs that differ primarily in the amount of overprovisioning. Samsung has announced that their second generation of Z-NAND will include a MLC version, but these drives are using the SLC version. Like the TLC-based PM1733, the new Z-NAND SSDs will also feature dual-port capability and PCIe 4.0 support. Sequential reads of up to 12GB/s are claimed, but this product line is all about random I/O, which Samsung hasn't detailed yet. Samsung demoed a 4TB model, significantly larger than the 800GB maximum for the first-generation SZ985.

Z-NAND [samsung.com] (PDF) has lower latency than normal NAND, and could be compared to Intel and Micron's 3D XPoint.

Related: Western Digital and Samsung at the Flash Memory Summit [soylentnews.org]
Samsung Announces a 128 TB SSD With QLC NAND [soylentnews.org]
Samsung Announces Production of 1-4 TB Consumer 3D QLC NAND SSDs [soylentnews.org]

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