Western Digital (WD) has introduced the industry’s first 2TB 3D QLC NAND device. The new flash memory has the potential to change the market for high-capacity SSDs by creating much faster and larger SSDs that consume less power. This was a preliminary demonstration of the chip, and its official announcement will take place later.
The chip is based on the proven 218-layer BiCS8 manufacturing node and is so small that it can be placed on the tip of a finger. The company has not yet disclosed the technical details of the new product, but it has shared detailed comparative performance and power figures. Given the fact that WD is positioning the device for data centers and AI storage needs, we can make some assumptions about the performance targets.
The 2TB (256GB) 3D QLC NAND chips will allow manufacturers to build a 1TB SSD using only 4 memory chips and a 2TB drive using 8 chips. This significantly reduces costs and also makes it easy to create models with 16 chips, which will provide 4 TB of capacity. All this will help reduce the cost of high-capacity SSDs.
WD says that the QLC’s layout density is 15-19% higher than that of competitors. The company also claims that it is 50% faster than competing NAND chips (in terms of I/O speed), while requiring 13% less power to program per gigabyte of data than competitors.
Source: tomshardware