Western Digital (WD) has unveiled the industry's first 2Tb 3D QLC NAND device. The new flash memory has the potential to change the market for high-capacity solid-state drives, creating much faster and more capacious SSDs that consume less energy. This was a preliminary chip demonstration, with its official announcement to follow shortly.
The chip is based on the proven 218-layer BiCS8 production node and is so small that it can fit on the tip of a finger. At the moment, the company has not yet revealed the technical details of the novelty, but it has shared detailed comparative performance and power metrics. Given that WD is positioning the device for data centers and AI storage needs, some assumptions can be made regarding the target performance metrics.
The 2Tb (256GB) 3D QLC NAND chips will allow manufacturers to create 1TB SSDs using only 4 memory chips, and 2TB drives using 8 chips. This significantly reduces costs, as well as allows for easy creation of models with 16 crystals, providing a capacity of 4TB. All of this will help lower the cost of high-capacity solid-state drives.
WD claims that the QLC layout density is 15-19% higher than competitors. The company also claims that it is 50% faster than competing NAND chips (in input-output speed), while requiring 13% less energy per gigabyte of data than competitors.
Source: tomshardware
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