Samsung Starts Producing V-NAND, Massive SSDs Not Far Off.

I’ve been in the market for a new PC for a little while now so occasionally I’ll indulge myself in a little hypothetical system building so I can figure out how much I want to spend (lots) and what kind of computer I’ll get out of it (a super fast one). One of the points that got me unstuck was the fact that whilst I can get semi-decent performance out of my RAID10 set which stores most of my stuff it’s no where near the performance of my SSD that holds the OS and my regularly used applications. Easy, I thought, I’ll just RAID together some SSDs and get the performance I want with enough space to hold all my games and other miscellany. Thing is though SSDs don’t like to be in RAID sets (thanks to TRIM not working with it) unless its RAID0 and I’m not terribly keen on halving the MTBF just so I can get some additional space. No what I need is a bigger drive and it looks like Samsung is ready to deliver on that.

That little chip is the key to realizing bigger SSDs (among other things). It’s a new type of flash memory called V-NAND based on a new gate technology called CTF and Samsung has just started mass production of them.

What’s really quite groovy about this new kind of NAND chip is that unlike all other computer chips which are planar in nature, I.E. all the transistors lie on a single plane, V-NAND (as you can likely guess) is actually a vertical stack of planar chips. This allows for incredible densities inside a single chip with this first generation clocking in at a whopping 128GB. Putting that in perspective the drive that I’m currently using has the same capacity as that single chip which means that if I replaced its memory with this new V-NAND I’d  be looking at a 1TB drive. For tech heads like me even hearing that it was theoretically possible to do something like that would make us weak at the knees but these are chips that you can start buying today.

Apparently this isn’t their most dense chip either as their new 3D NAND tech allows them to go up to 24 layers high. I can’t seem to find a reference that states just how many layers are in this current chip so I’m not sure how dense we’re talking here but it seems like this will be the first chip among many and I doubt they’ll stop at 24.

As if all that wasn’t enough Samsung is also touting higher reliability, from anywhere between 2x to 10x, as well as at least double the write performance of traditional NAND packages. All SSDs are at the point where the differences in write/read speeds are almost invisible to the end user so that may be moot for many but for system builders it’s an amazing leap forward. Considering we can already get some pretty amazing IOPS from the SSDs available today doubling that just means we can do a whole lot more with a whole lot less hardware and that’s always a good thing. Whether those claims hold up in the real world will have to be seen however but there’s a pretty close relationship between data density and increased throughput.

Unfortunately whilst these chips are hitting mass production today I couldn’t find any hint of which partners are creating drives based around them or if Samsung was working on one themselves. They’ve been releasing some pretty decent SSDs recently, indeed they were the ones I was eyeing off for my next potential system, so I can’t imagine they’d be too far off given that they have all the expertise to create one. Indeed they just recently released the gigantic 1.6TB SSD that uses the new PCIe interface NVMe to deliver some pretty impressive speeds so I wouldn’t be surprised if their next drive comes out on that platform using this new V-NAND.

It’s developments like this that are a testament to the fact that Moore’s Law will keep on keeping on long despite the numerous doubters ringing its death bell. With this kind of technology in mind its easy to imagine it being applied elsewhere, increasing density in other areas like CPU dies and volatile memory. Of course porting such technology is non-trivial but I’d hazard a guess that all the chip manufacturers worldwide are chomping at the bit to get in on this and I’m sure Samsung will be more than happy to license the patents to them.

For a princely sum, of course 😉