BwazeWe're reading about additional layer breakthroughs for years and years - what does this bring into consumer sector? Maximum capacity is stagnating for 6 years now, that was unthinkable in any other era of home computers... And price wise we're also going up, not down - with many vendors now offering 2 TB drives as largest capacity, to somehow hide the fact how overpriced they are.

azraelI guess it's a bit like with GPUs. Why sell "cheap" to us peasants when they can get bags of cash from enterprise. Especially when NAND manufacturers have a habit of artificially limiting production so as not to hurt their bottom line. However, as capacity on a single die grows, prices are bound to go down.

BwazeHow many extra layers have they crammed into chips, making them smaller and cheaper to make since then?

azraelI guess it's a bit like with GPUs. Why sell "cheap" to us peasants when they can get bags of cash from enterprise. Especially when NAND manufacturers have a habit of artificially limiting production so as not to hurt their bottom line. However, as capacity on a single die grows, prices are bound to go down.

BwazeI have very little sympathy for NAND companies that moan and bitch about market oversupply for years now. They are basically offering the same products for more than half a decade - why would anyone upgrade?

BwazeYeah, benchmark figures have gone up, but most real world tests show that they haven't moved the user experience by any noticeable amount. Optane did, and would even more if they offered competitive transfer speeds, but wasn't worth the effort. So what we basically got are power hungry drives that emit a lot of heat for negligible improvements in application load, install times etc.

BwazeAnd if enterprise demand is so great (for all the AI server needs), why moan about consumer space? Are technologies so far apart those are two different product sectors with completely different solutions that don't transfer?

BwazeCan we get an affordable 8 TB SSD? No? We're further from them than we were at the release of first consumer 8 TB drive, Samsung 870 QVO 8 TB 5 years ago! How many extra layers have they crammed into chips, making them smaller and cheaper to make since then?

WirkoYou're making it sound like production is naturally unlimited like the growth of ivy, and companies actively fight that with pesticides.

azraelWell, I kind of call it artificial limitation when production is scaled back because profits are lower. I get that they cannot operate at or even below cost, but I do think there's room to either lower prices or grace us with higher capacity drives at the same price. Just my opinion.

BwazeThere are press releases for basically every major jump in layer number about how that will unlock larger capacity consumer SSDs, last ones from Kioxia and Samsung from early 2024 promised larger capacity drives and lower prices of 8 TB drives. A year later, and all we have is another news article of higher layer count, with price per TB going up, and max capacity actually lowering on many drives.

16TB M.2 SSDs will soon grace the market — Kioxia unveils 2Tb 3D QLC NAND to build bigger SSDs

Samsung's upcoming 280-layer QLC flash could allow for 16TB M.2 SSDs — claims up to 50% higher storage density than the competition

Samsung is prepping 400-layer V-NAND for future 16TB SSD storage and PCIe 5.0 performance

TheLostSwedeThe NAND makers are far from offering the same product now as they did a decade ago.

It's hard to improve the performance with NAND, on an SSD the main way of getting better performance is putting more NAND channels in parallel, but even this has its obvious limits when it comes to random read/write performance. Optande/Xpoint didn't scale well in manufacturing though, which is why Intel/micron called it quits.

The NAND should largely be the same.

See, this is where you are getting things mixed up. NAND has barely shrunk at all when it comes to the nodes that NAND is manufactured on, it's even worse than DRAM. Not sure if you saw yesterday's news from micron about their new 1-gamma node, which is at the very least their fifth 10-nm class node for DRAM since 2018. By your logic, that's seven years of no progress.
Stacking the NAND wafers is not making NAND cheaper, as it's a complex and costly process, although TSV (Through Silicon Vias) has made it somewhat more manageable, but due to the difficulty in providing thin enough NAND wafers, there are some serious manufacturing limitations here. Up till now, it's been hard going above 300 layer stacks, which is why we've ended up somewhere around 230-250 tall stacks at the moment. Everyone is trying to make taller stacks, but it doesn't mean they're not working on improving the density per NAND wafer, but it's slow progress on both ends.

RUSeriousThat said, prices are coming down slowly for 4TB M.2 drives - I'm guessing the high inflationary period in the US has had a lot to do with the lagging price/TB curve for consumer SSD.

Frank_100Isn't it time someone makes a serious effort to bring re-ram or phase change memory to the market?