Wednesday, November 9th 2022
Solidigm is Working on 192-layer 3D QLC With Improved Endurance, 61.44 TB SSD
Solidigm—the company that Intel sold its SSD business to—held a tech day last week where the company shared some details about its future roadmaps. The company appears to be focusing on 3D QLC NAND and its 192-layer product promises both larger drives, but also enhanced endurance for QLC NAND. For example, Solidigm's 30.72 TB SSD is promising a PBW of around 32 PB (Petabyte) endurance. This is using what the company calls QLC Essential Endurance NAND.
However, its QLC Value Endurance NAND is what will enable the 61.44 TB drive, which is said to offer around 65 PB write endurance, but it should be noted that this is at 16 KB aligned data or during other types of light data writes. Neither type of NAND is destined for consumer applications as of now, as Solidigm is only targeting E1, E3 and U.2 form factors. Regardless, this appears to be a huge step forward for 3D QLC NAND and Solidigm is hoping that its upcoming drives will be able to replace mechanical drives in the enterprise market space. On top of this, Solidigm also claims to offer better throughput and latency compared to its competitors, but we're still looking at SATA type level SSD performance for the IOPS. The first drives with the new 192-layer 3D QLC NAND are expected to be available sometime early next year.
Source:
Blocks and Files
However, its QLC Value Endurance NAND is what will enable the 61.44 TB drive, which is said to offer around 65 PB write endurance, but it should be noted that this is at 16 KB aligned data or during other types of light data writes. Neither type of NAND is destined for consumer applications as of now, as Solidigm is only targeting E1, E3 and U.2 form factors. Regardless, this appears to be a huge step forward for 3D QLC NAND and Solidigm is hoping that its upcoming drives will be able to replace mechanical drives in the enterprise market space. On top of this, Solidigm also claims to offer better throughput and latency compared to its competitors, but we're still looking at SATA type level SSD performance for the IOPS. The first drives with the new 192-layer 3D QLC NAND are expected to be available sometime early next year.
19 Comments on Solidigm is Working on 192-layer 3D QLC With Improved Endurance, 61.44 TB SSD
In any case, performance won't be out of the world for these products so ultimately the deciding factor will be price and power consumption. Some of these larger SSDs tend to consume a good chunk of power reaching over 20w in a large E1.L form factor. At that point you are very much competing with HDDs as you loose the advantage of space and power savings that SSD's typically bring.
Hopefully some of the larger sizes will also trickle down to the consumer space. As of current there are not a lot of high capacity options in that space. 8TB options should become vastly more common.
I agree, affordable 8tb and larger SSDs would be nice to see a bit more frequently on the consumer side.
At this size, it's gunna need a lot more flash modules than a regular SSD
Yes, the 4K writes are very good, but the comparison was throughput, but I guess you only read half the sentence.
Also, I was comparing to general SATA SSDs, not QLC SATA SSDs.
Sorry if a part of the graph was left out, it's just too tall.
About to move to a 2TB P41 plus. Reviews made it appear extremely impressive (for a QLC-based DRAM-less drive.) I'd love to see dozens of TB SSDs approaching Spinning Rust pricing.
TBQH, with QLC (and 5-layer NAND coming), cost is the only factor at this point keeping NVME drives from surpassing (con/prosumer) HDDs' capacities.