News - Samsung starts mass production of industry's first 3D V-NAND flash

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This 3D Vertical NAND memory will achieve gains in performance, density and reliability.

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Read more.

As I said in the other (R-RAM) thread, I'm really looking forward to a comparrison of the Crossbar R-RAM and this 3D-nand, especially alongside the prices.

"an increase of a minimum of 2X to a maximum 10X higher reliability."

Surely if the minimum is 2x then that's the reliability figure. You can't say "this harddrive can run from 10 to 30 years, therefore it has a reliability of 30 years."

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Originally Posted by McEwin

"an increase of a minimum of 2X to a maximum 10X higher reliability."

Surely if the minimum is 2x then that's the reliability figure. You can't say "this harddrive can run from 10 to 30 years, therefore it has a reliability of 30 years."

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I suspect they can grade the chips as they come out of the fab depending on manufacturing tolerance, so they'll be able to offer multiple grades of V-NAND with different "reliability" - existing NAND flash producers do exactly the same thing (e.g. Kingston using a lower grade in their HyerX 3k drives).

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Originally Posted by Tpyo

As I said in the other (R-RAM) thread, I'm really looking forward to a comparrison of the Crossbar R-RAM and this 3D-nand, especially alongside the prices.

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I think you're getting ahead of yourself. Samsung are now mass producing these chips: they'll be available to go in consumer products in the very near future. Crossbar have only just produced the first working chips for RRAM - it'll be a long time, and take a lot of investment, before they get to the stage of mass production for incorporation into products. I'd expect (assuming the speed and reliability work out well) V-NAND to start being widely used in the next gen of SSDs, and RRAM to replace that several generations down the line. I can't see them ever being directly competing products.

So will a Samsung 850 PRO use this new storage? ;)

If it's similar prices to the current gear then put me down for two!

I'm assuming that this will be much much cheaper than that R-RAM, in with case roll on this technology :D

A standard Samsung ssd seems to only have 8 flash NAND chips on it and with that chassis and this memory density, that would only achieve 1TB, a value Samsung have already assassinated, haven't they?

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Originally Posted by sirtrouserpress

A standard Samsung ssd seems to only have 8 flash NAND chips on it and with that chassis and this memory density, that would only achieve 1TB, a value Samsung have already assassinated, haven't they?

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Possibly true, but don't forget that the article said:

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The South Korean tech giant says this provides more than twice the scaling possibilities of 20nm-class planar NAND flash.

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So, taking a simple minded approach, if we can "do" 1TB now, then with VNAND 2TB will be achievable. Not to be sniffed at?

But it's other attributes that interest me. Large size SSD's already seem to be top-of-class performers, so if VNAND gives performance gains then the lead that the "big boxes" have is only going to get bigger. Key to me though is the increased reliability - it's pretty obvious that when you start talking about higher densities, (and therefore higher capacities), that reliability becomes more important.

When I was specing my current machine I opted for a 64GB Vertex 2E, mainly because it was affordable, but also because I figured that having to recover/rebuild 60ish GB of data wasn't going to be too onerous if/when the SSD failed. Especially as I discovered subsequently that the 2E doesn't have the best reliability record! :o

Now I'm looking to migrate my current HDD-hosted apps partition to SSD and I definitely don't want to have to recover 256GB of data from backups. So I'm paying close attention to MTBF's and reports of driver instabilities or incompatibilities.