Oddly, Toshiba And WD Announce BiCS 4 And QLC Separately

[Guest]

Toshiba and Western Digital made two big technology announcements this week. One company announced shipping 4-bit per cell QLC flash and the other touts 96-layer BiCS. The announcements come at a contentious time between the manufacturing partners.

Oddly, Toshiba And WD Announce BiCS 4 And QLC Separately : Read more

 

[PC-Cobbler]

Toshiba and SanDisk had a great working relationship, partnering to develop world-class NAND flash. Then WDC buys SanDisk and the relationship degrades into one worthy of Jerry Springer. WDC is giving a master class on how not to run a partnership.

And I predict that, sooner than later, companies will build QLC SSDs with the drastically reduced life only hinted at, consumers will buy them in droves because of the cheaper prices, and then the ersatz Walmart shoppers will file lawsuits because their products do not last very long.

 

[drwho1]

All I saw was "2.5"SSD 100TB capacity" ... common! Make it happen! ... at earthly prices that humans can actually afford.

 

[derekullo]

QLC would make great backup storage.

"Toshiba laid out the plans for QLC with 2.5" form factor SSDs delivering 100TB of data capacity each"

Even with 100 P/E cycles thats still 100 x 100TB or 10 Petabytes of data.

I'm unsure how much that will cost but if Facebook wants it, its probably gonna be expensive.

But I'm not greedy, I'd take a 10 terabyte QLC for $400, 1 Petabyte Write Endurance FTW.

 

[dudmont]

someone, very wisely, said a long time ago, "buyer beware". course some of this is fairly complicated to learn, but if you don't educate yourself, you should lose all grounds to sue. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the cookie cutter oems demand the purchaser sign some agreement before sales, absolving the oem of liability for poor write life cycles.

 

[RomeoReject]

Any idea on when SSDs are supposed to reach price parity with HDDs? In some ways, one would assume they'd be slightly easier to produce: They're smaller, no motors to run, and assembly looks simpler than stacking and spacing platters.

 

[DerekA_C]

These corporations and tech inventors have stuff beyond this they have many different proven prototypes and the heads get to pick which is going to be released and how to maximize profit it is just that simple. Remember the oil shortage, but in reality they found more oil fields at the time and didn't want to lose profit same thing when bush jr took office. These same said companies all design and have designed military stuff since the 50's when ssd was first invented by IBM. I did not know this until yesterday. Also military and Nasa have used pretty much exclusive ssd since 1995 due to the anti shock and withstands much more harsh environments like heat, moisture, sand, dusk those sorts.

 

[derekullo]

Samsung / Hp / IBM wasn't going to market a hypothetical $8000 500 kilobyte ssd to a consumer knowing it was out of the price range of everyone but a super small niche of people with a near unlimited budget.

In 1995 you didn't have pci-e, you didn't even have SATA to connect the drive, you had EIDE or maybe NASA had an Ultra Ata prototype with a blazing fast 33 megabyte a second transfers.

So don't think today's ssd's existed in 1995.

Nasa didn't store cat videos nor reruns of Seinfeld on their drives either, only mission critical programs and information to help the astronauts not die in space and other experiments to figure out how not to die in space in the future.
All of this needed to withstand the 3+ G's of acceleration during take off and reentry.

A lot of ideas are ahead of their time and are unable to be produced due to a lack of other materials and other advancements in science.

The helicopter being one of the best examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter#Early_design

 

[Dr Croubie]

"...SSDs that focus on write once, read many (WORM) tasks. Facebook and other data center customers have asked for the technology..."

As if we needed any more proof that Facebook will never delete anything that it ever knew about you...

 

[photonboy]

REMOEREJECT,
Price parity will start at the lower capacities. HDD's do have a minimum cost due to the mechanical components but it also seems like they're dropping the lower capacity drives completely and just going with SSD's.

HDD's find ways to improve cost (i.e. hydrogen and using lasers), whereas SSD cost is actually inflated right now due to low supply of flash memory in general (affects many types of memory).

So there will be no exact date, just SSD's being used more for the lower-end and HDD's being used more for the high end.

 

[RomeoReject]

REMOEREJECT,
Price parity will start at the lower capacities. HDD's do have a minimum cost due to the mechanical components but it also seems like they're dropping the lower capacity drives completely and just going with SSD's.

HDD's find ways to improve cost (i.e. hydrogen and using lasers), whereas SSD cost is actually inflated right now due to low supply of flash memory in general (affects many types of memory).

So there will be no exact date, just SSD's being used more for the lower-end and HDD's being used more for the high end.

Appreciate the reply, thanks for the information!