12 ms·
Micron's 232-layer NAND enables 2TB flash chips that deliver data 50% faster
- Robotbeat 4y agoAt what point will the wear resistance be so low from increasing the layers (and bits) per cell that flash becomes effectively write-once, read many (WORM)?
- lazide 4y agoKeep in mind, these are layers of cells, not multi-level cells. Each of the layers has an individual multi-level cell. That said, Samsung quad-level cells only have 1k write lifetime, so likely not far off.
- hinkley 4y agoI love how someone said there's a septuple-level cell out there... but you have to immerse it in liquid nitrogen for it to work.
- __alexs 4y agoPLC NAND is already on the way to commercial hardware.
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- mritun 4y agoRemember, even 1000 writes means roughly 3Y of full drive writes per day with the naïve wear leveling and the most brutal write load. For most write loads the drives made of this kind of NAND can be easily warranted for 3Y.
- lazide 4y agoYeah, 1K is still in the range of reasonable (if the wear leveling isn't terrible), another order of magnitude decrease though and we're getting on the edge of not.
- cowtools 4y ago1k writes sounds good enough for consumer hardware I suppose. As long as there's some some type of S.M.A.R.T. system to warn the user before it wears out.
- gruez 4y agousually it goes into read-only mode when it wears out, so there's no data loss.
- cowtools 4y agothat's fantastic actually! One problem might be that programs don't anticipate this behavior, like if it wears out while a filesystem is still syncing
- blibble 4y agoall modern filesystems are either journalled or always consistent on disk, so shouldn't be a problem if it dies during worst case you have to copy it to another disk and replay the journal
- mgerdts 4y agoThis doesn’t account for the write amplification factor, which is quite unlikely to be 1 with a naive wear leveling implementation and the most brutal write workload.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y agonote that there are data structures (eg b epsilon trees) that can guarantee a write amplification factor of log_b(disk size) for very large b (over 1000). this means that if you are willing to sacrifice a small amount of sequential read speed, you can guarantee write amplification of no more than 4 (with a few mb of RAM).
- AtlasBarfed 4y agoYeah they are going to stacked cells because the endurance is so bad at smaller process nodes. SSD prices have stalled for quite a while. By now they should be getting in shouting distance of hard drives but unfortunately memory makers are much more of a colluding trust than Hard Drive manufacturers. What I really want is a high-lifetime write medium to go with SSDs. Hard disks aren't really it. It's too bad the DVD/CD form factor/drive died with high speed internet, holographic storage would have been great. But there was no investment/demand to push it.
- hinkley 4y agoLevels per cell and wear I understand. What's the link between circuit layer depth and wear?
- Dylan16807 4y agoIncreasing layers should cause roughly zero problems. As far as bits per cell, 4 already gives you very slow writes and not a lot of them. Let's say that maxes out at 5 or 6.
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- rowanG077 4y agoThermals? SSDs have slowly but surely increased in TDP.
- Dylan16807 4y agoFlash likes to run pretty hot and we still rarely attach heat sinks, even less often proper heat sinks with fins. There's a lot of headroom. And if your main goal is capacity you could decide to just not run it faster, which will avoid basically all the extra heat.
- Robotbeat 4y agoIndeed, the flash write endurance is actually significant higher at higher temperatures (I presume because of greater charge mobility) with modern flash. But data retention, naturally, gets shorter at high temperatures and quite a bit longer at low temperatures, and it can vary by orders of magnitude between temperature extremes. Again, I think due to the charge mobility effect.
- kasabali 4y agoThat's from controller chips.
- dale_glass 4y agoThere was a paper a while back that promised a healing process for flash: https://www.zdnet.com/article/self-healing-flash-for-infinite-life/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/self-healing-flash-for-infinit... I have no idea what happened to that though, because it sounded extremely promising.
- kasabali 4y agoProbably they're more interested in selling you new flash.
- chx 4y agoThis is TLC flash, don't worry.
- userbinator 4y agoEven the reads aren't truly nondestructive --- look up "read disturb".
- rasz 4y ago> write-once, read many but not too many, read disturb is also a NAND problem.
- yread 4y agoI would actually love that. I need fast random access to data that never changes. SSDs are an overkill and too expensive, HDDs are too slow
- O__________O 4y agoHere’s the official product page: https://www.micron.com/products/nand-flash/232-layer-nand https://www.micron.com/products/nand-flash/232-layer-nand
- ksec 4y agoA much better article on Anandtech [1]. Dual Stack 116 Layers. And as noted inside the article 100+ layer per stack isn't exactly new. Personally I am interested in Cost per Bit reduction. Hopefully there will be news in Flash Memory Summit new week. I wouldn't mind to have a slow 100 write cycle NAND that cost a third of today's price. Think 2TB USB Stick for $49. [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/17509/microns-232-layer-nand-now-shipping https://www.anandtech.com/show/17509/microns-232-layer-nand-...
- dtgriscom 4y agoI suspect it would be difficult to properly balance writing across blocks with only 100 cycles before wearout.
- Zandikar 4y agoDepends. If you're trying to use it as a drop in replacement for a Scratch/Boot/Database drive, sure. That'd probably not be a good plan. But if you consider HDD's are primarily deployed in WORM or WFRM (Write Few, Read Many) work loads these days, a 100 P/E cycle NAND flash that has comparable $/TB value to spinning disk could definitely have a viable market. It'd be kinda like Flashes version of Shingled HDD's. Got be a bit more careful with their usecase, can't just drop them in whereever and expect it all to work fine, but as long as you use them in WORM/WFRM, they'd be excellent for greater physical data density and far superior power efficiency.
- TapamN 4y agoFor some kind of write once archival storage, it would probably still have a use. But with flash that fragile, I'd be worried about how sensitive to read disturb it would be.
- tlamponi 4y ago> And as noted inside the article 100+ layer per stack isn't exactly new. Per deck, not stack. The current prevalent 176 (total) Layer consists also of two 88 Layer decks, as the same article mentions (check the table) so 116 layers per deck is new!
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- ineedasername 4y agoIs there a (known) theoretical limit on density/mm^3?
- femto 4y agoThe Bekenstein bound? A maximum number of bits can be placed on the surface of sphere. Beyond that it turns into a black hole. Mind you, one or two other practical limits might come into play before a memory chip hits that one. :-) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound --- Edit: The maximum information capacity of a radio antenna is limited by the surface area enclosing the antenna. One could theorise that that in addition to a maximum density of information storage there will also be a limit on the error free rate at which information can be sent to/from a storage system system, probably related to the surface area enclosing the system.
- jhallenworld 4y agoWell under normal conditions (no degenerate matter)- the material with the lowest molar volume should give a good idea. At least on earth, this happens to be diamond: so ~1.7 * 10^20 atoms / mm^3. With one bit per atom: 20 million TB.
- tambourine_man 4y agoI think we would be in trouble way before that. Quantum effects would mean you would change a decent percentage of adjacent bits while setting one. We’re probably struggling with such effects already.
- cmrdporcupine 4y agoI see phrases like this "doubles the density of bits stored per unit area versus competing chips, packing in 14.6 gigabits per square millimeter. Its 1-terabit chips are bundled into 2-terabyte packages, each of which is barely more than a centimeter on a side" and I just imagine sending this sentence back to my 12 year old self, sitting in front of my Commodore VIC-20 and imagine how science fiction that would sound. I mean, it sounds science fiction to me now. Amazing.
- jiggawatts 4y agoAnd affordable for common people. I remember tiny “spy cameras” being a movie trope, now everyone has one in their pocket.
- metadat 4y agoYeah, human technological progress has come a long way! The human mind acclimates to improvements remarkably fast, and the joy found in such novelties tends to be fleeting and quickly fade as it becomes just another normal part of everyday life we take for granted (e.g. fancy new tech, or really anything new and nice). I like to frequently reflect on how amazing it is I am alive and even exist at all! Gratitude is truly the only effective counterdefense I've found to reduce the fade of true joys in life, like my friends and family.
- agumonkey 4y agoI have a different stance, I go frugal and away from tech. Because at some point I become confused by the quantities involved and the lack of joy.
- 14 4y agoWhat is truly amazing is all our devices have been hampered by copyright laws and competing interests. On my iPhone I can’t load a YouTube song then switch over to Snapchat and start a video call while listening to that song. That is just one example. There are many many more. But we have been trained to thing <40% is the normal. This is why for years I followed the jailbreak scene because there was so many cool features one could get by jailbreaking that just wasn’t offered to normal users.
- robbiet480 4y agoMaybe now I can get a 2TB SSD for my Steam Deck.
- Dunedan 4y agoYou likely can very soon. Linus Tech Tips just fitted a Steam Deck with an engineering sample of a Micron M.2 2230 2TB SSD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXhT13oZchA&t=122s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXhT13oZchA&t=122s
- anewpersonality 4y agoAmazing. Here we have a tier 2/3 company actually innovating, yet the engineers getting paid peanuts
- kken 4y agoHow is Micron a "tier 2" company? They are probably the oldest surviving DRAM company and have always been in the TOP5. No idea about their payment, but i met some of the engineers who work there and they are extremely dedidcated. I don't think they are shopping around for other opportunities to maximize they pay, like it seems common in the bay area.
- anewpersonality 4y agoBranding.
- djmips 4y agoWhere the median home price is probably $500K
- gigatexal 4y agoAny word on DWPD or other endurance facts?
- ece 4y agoIt's still TLC, so it should be pretty decent.
- AnonMO 4y agoWhy is micron constantly first to market with new high density nand, but their market share doesn’t reflect their progress. Unless I’m miss informed.
- tlamponi 4y agoNote that Crucial also belongs to Micron and some other vendors may also use their controllers and/or chips, there aren't that many companies that actually can make those high-end NAND chips end-to-end (Micron, Samsung, WD and Intel, IIRC).
- hackernewds 4y agoNeither does the stock outperform. It's almost like investing in a commodity market (which doesn't seem that outlandish given the reach of storage now)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y agoHow is it cooled?
- IYasha 4y agoF*k density. I'm for reliability!