Items tagged with V-NAND
Samsung finds itself in a braggadocios mood over the continued development of its vertical NAND flash memory chips, and in a blog post spanning nearly 1,400 words, the company talked about what makes it so special, and where it is headed. To that latter point, its 7th generation V-NAND flash memory chips are punching their ticket to both PCI Express 4 and, eventually, PCI Express 5.0 solid state drives. The chest-thumping is not unwarranted. Three-dimensional (3D) chip stacking is what has enabled higher capacities on increasingly fast storage products, at acceptable thickness levels for today's electronic devices, like smartphones and PCs. It's pretty remarkable when you take a moment to think...
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Although much of the excitement in the solid state storage market revolves around the latest, bleeding-edge NVMe-based drives, there is still a massive need for SATA-based solutions. Not only are there a myriad of legacy systems ripe for upgrades that rely on SATA, but owners of current-gen systems often want more affordable, higher-capacity -- but still fast -- solid state storage to pair with their NVMe boot drives. Samsung has traditionally been a leader in the space, with a succession of popular drives over the years. The newest members of the family, the Samsung SSD 870 QVO we’ll be showing you here today, builds upon Samsung’s success with higher capacities, strong performance...
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Enterprise-class solid state drives used to be rare beasts that commanded heavy price premiums over their more common, consumer-oriented counterparts. As leading SSD and flash memory manufacturers have evolved their processes and technologies, however, availability and pricing for many enterprise-class solid state storage solutions have dropped dramatically. Whereas enterprise SSDs that target mission-critical workstations or data centers used to cost many times that of a consumer SSD, that is no longer the case for some products. Samsung's 883 and 983 DCT drives we’ll be showing you here, for example, are available in relatively large capacities and surprisingly won’t break...
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Samsung is once again showing itself to be among the leaders in NAND storage technology by today announcing that it has started production of 4-bit QLC (quad-level cell) SATA SSDs. The new QLC SSDs leverage 64-layer 1Tb V-NAND that retains the performance levels afforded by current 3-bit SSD offerings. This QLC V-NAND will initially be used in mainstream consumer applications, which means that we're looking at SSDs with a SATA interface. Sequential read and write speeds are pegged at 540MB/sec and 520MB/sec respectively, and the SSDs will be available in a 2.5-inch form-factor for desktops and laptops. The company does note, however, that M.2 NVMe enterprise SSDs using QLC V-NAND will begin mass...
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Samsung has announced that it has begun mass production of a new type of Flash storage chip. The company's fifth-gen V-NAND has the fastest data transfer speed in the industry and is the first to use the Toggle DDR 4.0 NAND interface. That new interface improves the speed for transmitting data of the 256Gb V-NAND to over 1.4 Gbps. That is a 40% gain in performance for this new Samsung 90-layer NAND technology, compared to Samsung's 64-layer predecessor. Samsung says that the new V-NAND (Vertically stacked NAND) has energy efficiency comparable to the old 64-layer chip because the operating voltage for the fifth-gen part has been reduced from the 1.8 volts required for that old...
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As a major player in the storage market, Samsung has the advantage of also being a producer of its own flash memory chips. That means it does not have to rely on other chip makers, but can innovate and actively drive the market forward. And that is exactly what Samsung is doing. At its inaugural Samsung Tech Day at this year's Flash Memory Summit, Samsung trotted out various vertical NAND (V-NAND) solutions. It also announced a 1-terabit V-NAND chip that will pave the way for more capacious M.2 NVMe solid state drives. This is something that Samsung has been working on for quite some time. After initially making mention of 1Tb V-NAND chips back in 2013 during the unveiling of the industry's first...
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The memory chip wars are heating up. Just four months ago, Western Digital kicked off pilot production of the industry's first 64-layer 512-gigabyte (Gb) 3D NAND flash memory. While it will take some time to reach mass production status, that's exactly where Samsung is now at with its 64-layer 256Gb Vertical NAND (V-NAND) chips, which were an industry-first back in January. Volume production of 64-layer 256Gb V-NAND flash memory means more availability for high-performance storage solutions in multiple categories, including server, consumer PC, and even mobile. Samsung says it has been working with on a wide range of solutions itself, including embedded UFS memory, branded solid state drives...
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Solid State Storage continues to come down in cost and scale higher in speed and density. Though spinning hard disk media will likely have a place at least in the data center perhaps for generations to come, SSDs are making great strides, driving toward cost parity with HDDs with each new generation of product, while offering orders of magnitude performance gains and even higher reliability in many applications. One of the biggest names in Flash storage is Samsung, from their consumer grade SSD 950 Pro and 850 EVO lines to the squarely enterprise-targeted product the company has announced for volume availability today. Laying to rest the short-lived claim Fixstar made on "the world's largest...
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The rapid pace of innovation in the solid state storage market shows no signs of letting up. In only a few generations, the industry bumped up against the limits of the legacy SATA interface, and began leveraging PCI Express for additional bandwidth with some passable, though somewhat clunky bridged solutions (in retrospect). Then some ultra-fast, native PCI Express offerings hit, and have since evolved into multiple form factors, including slotted and gumstick models, with varying physical interfaces.Some of the more recent introductions, like the excellent Intel SSD 750, feature many of the latest innovations, like PCI Express, the latest NAND controllers, and support for NVMe, or Non-Volatile...
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NAND flash technology is advancing at a rapid clip, and that’s resulting in solid state drives (SSDs) that are faster, more capacious and cheaper (per GB). Look no further than Samsung’s announcement this week of its latest Vertical NAND (V-NAND) chips that allows for the ultra fast PM1725 NVMe SSD capable of delivering mind-blowing sequential read speeds of up to 5,500 megabytes per second. But if you think those read speeds are impressive, Samsung just made our jaws drop with the announcement of an incredible advancement on the storage density front. The company’s new PM1633a SSD manages to pack 16TB (the actually formatted capacity is 15.36TB) into a 2.5-inch-ish form-factor. You read that...
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Sometimes it's the enterprise sector that gets dibs on the coolest technology, and so it goes with a trio of TCO-optimized, high-performance solid state drives from Samsung, all three of which are based on three-dimensional (3D) Vertical NAND (V-NAND) flash memory technology. And get this -- the fastest of bunch can read data at up to 5,500 megabytes per second. That's the rated sequential read speed of Samsung's PM1725, a half-height, half-length (HHHL) card-type NVMe SSD. Other rated specs include a random read speed of up to 1,000,000 IOPS, random write performance of up to 120,000 IOPS, and sequential writes topping out at 1,800MB/s. On paper, this new PCIe SSD lays to waste even Intel's...
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Samsung announced that it is putting its second generation of Vertical NAND (V-NAND) flash memory into mass production, and unlike the enterprise-facing first-gen V-NAND products, this new glut of storage is aimed at high-end consumer storage. This generation features 32-layer 3D V-NAND, which is a step up from the older generation’s 24 layers, although Samsung says that it can use essentially all the same manufacturing equipment, which saves a bundle on cost. This isn’t just theoretical stuff, though; Samsung is releasing a lineup of consumer SSDs with the technology in capacities of 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, a 1TB. The company boasts that the 3D V-NAND SSDs last roughly twice as long...
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Sadly, we're still waiting for SSDs to completely replace HDDs in the mainstream, but Samsung's unleashing a new solid state drive into the enterprise that'll have even average consumers drooling. The company has launched what it says is the world's first 3D V-NAND based SSD for enterprise applications. Samsung's V-NAND SSD comes in 960GB and 480GB versions, with the larger boasting the highest level of performance, offering more than 20 percent increase in sequential and random write speeds by utilizing 64 dies of MLC 3D V-NAND flash, each offering 128 gigabits (Gb) of storage, with a six-gigabit-per-second SATA interface controller. The new V-NAND SSD also offers 35K program erase cycles and...
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Samsung announced that it has developed and begun mass producing a new kind of NAND flash that could shake up the storage industry by substantially increasing the reliability, scaling, and performance of flash. The product is three dimensional vertical NAND (or 3D V-NAND), and it’s slated for use in both the consumer and enterprise markets in embedded storage and SSDs. By using a vertical cell design with 3D Charge Trap Flash (CTF) technology and a “vertical interconnect process technology” that links the cell array, Samsung enabled a single-chip density of 128Gb. In a release, the company described the technology by saying, “To do this, Samsung revamped its CTF architecture,...
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