Samsung Mass Producing 3-Bit Per Cell 3D V-NAND

[N.Broekhuijsen]

Samsung has begun mass production of its 3-bit per cell 3D V-NAND memory.

Samsung Mass Producing 3-Bit Per Cell 3D V-NAND : Read more

 

[dovah-chan]

Higher capacity NAND that can be made at a lower cost while being very durable is now being mass produced?

I-I can't stop throwing money at the screen!

 

[usertests]

I'm hyped for post-NAND technologies, but it looks like Samsung has been extremely aggressive with V-NAND. I've heard SanDisk and others say V-NAND is 2-3 years away, but Samsung brought it to the market. Now they are expanding both the number of layers and bits per cell. The large process (40nm?) and vertical over-provisioning can offset the endurance lost by moving to 3 bits per cell.

If Samsung keeps this up, it could drive down stagnant SSD pricing and deliver an existential blow to HDDs, which have also had stagnant pricing. Or at least spur them to be more competitive.

 

[alidan]

I'm hyped for post-NAND technologies, but it looks like Samsung has been extremely aggressive with V-NAND. I've heard SanDisk and others say V-NAND is 2-3 years away, but Samsung brought it to the market. Now they are expanding both the number of layers and bits per cell. The large process (40nm?) and vertical over-provisioning can offset the endurance lost by moving to 3 bits per cell.

If Samsung keeps this up, it could drive down stagnant SSD pricing and deliver an existential blow to HDDs, which have also had stagnant pricing. Or at least spur them to be more competitive.

It all depends on if adding more layers costs more than making a bigger chip.
What keeps ssd tech expensive is the size of the silicon. for an easy comparison, if there is a 10sqmm chip, if stacking another layer costs less then adding another 10sqmm, you will see chips get cheap, potentially knocking on hdds door sooner than i anticipated (currently, they would meat the price per gig of the best hdds at about 7-10nm, but that number was calculated several months ago)

im really curious about stacking when it comes to everything, because of the possibilities it enables, but what i want to know right now, is the cost.

 

[cryoburner]

I suspect hard drives will still be around in some capacity for at least another decade or so. Even looking at the best case scenario, I doubt solid-state drives will be able to match hard drives on a cost-per-gigabyte basis for bulk storage until at least the early 2020s. Hard drive cost and performance has been stagnating the last few years, but there are some technologies on the horizon that could keep them viable for a while to come.

Of course, not everyone needs terabytes of storage, so SSDs will probably replace hard drives in consumer systems and workstations much sooner than that. At the lower end, 120GB SSDs are already becoming price competitive with hard drives. A comparably-priced hard drive may get you a terabyte of space, but unless you're storing something like video or a large collection of games, 120GBs should be more than enough for a typical user's applications and data. SSDs could easily become the norm in new systems within the next couple years, with hard drives being an addon for those who need more storage.

 

[seinfeld1123]

cool. consumers win. I don't really understand how this makes anything cheaper. they still need to make the same amount of memory whether its 3d stacked or not. and they haven't shrunk the nand itself, so they weren't fitting more onto the same space. so how is this cheaper to make ?

also SSD's have been a showcase of tech for a while but the sizes vs the price have been the turnoff for me. and I am a tech Whore so I love it. but until I see 1tb SSD's with decent pricing then I wont be getting one

 

[seinfeld1123]

cool. consumers win. I don't really understand how this makes anything cheaper. they still need to make the same amount of memory whether its 3d stacked or not. and they haven't shrunk the nand itself, so they weren't fitting more onto the same space. so how is this cheaper to make ?

also SSD's have been a showcase of tech for a while but the sizes vs the price have been the turnoff for me. and I am a tech Whore so I love it. but until I see 1tb SSD's with decent pricing then I wont be getting one

 

[cryoburner]

SSD's have been a showcase of tech for a while but the sizes vs the price have been the turnoff for me. and I am a tech Whore so I love it. but until I see 1tb SSD's with decent pricing then I wont be getting one

I'd say SSDs are certainly more than a "showcase of tech" at this point. Looking at them strictly on a cost-per-Gigabyte basis, they can't yet compete with a traditional hard drive for bulk storage, but neither can the RAM in your computer. They are probably best thought of as something in between the two. Just as you're likely willing to install extra RAM for $10 per Gigabyte to improve your computer's performance, putting your OS and applications on an SSD can provide a significant performance boost as well. As long as there's room in your system, there's nothing saying you can't use both an SSD and hard drive. An SSD doesn't have to provide a Terabyte of storage to be useful, and even a lower-capacity 60 or 120GB model should be large enough for use as a boot drive.