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Micron's 232-layer NAND enables 2TB flash chips that deliver data 50% faster

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81–90 of 131 posts

Re: Micron's 232-layer NAND enables 2TB flash chips that deliver data 50% faster

#81
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see these as problems as long as software is smart enough. It merely requires the device to be always powered up (read: has a backup battery that can do periodic flash rewrites for 5 years). And it requires the controller to keep track of the current endurance of every page. A 'worn out' page can still hold data, it just holds either less data, or holds that data for fewer hours before needing to be rewritten…

>or double the ECC bits Are you aware of even a single ssd product allowing user to reconfigure capacity outside of obtaining secret/proprietary non public manufacturer service software? The only technical way for a drive to automagically shrink size on its own is by starting to mark TRIM freed sectors as BAD and hoping OS running on top will be able to recognize this and transfer BAD status to the filesystem - thats…

On SAS disks you can reduce the capacity. I don't know if this has any influence on spare sectors and write cycles though.

Re: Micron's 232-layer NAND enables 2TB flash chips that deliver data 50% faster

#82
post #77
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing to me how you don't consider any of these major drawbacks as problems. The Samsung 840 evo was a disaster and here we are celebrating more of the same. While I completely agree endurance can - and it is - be managed with software, rewriting data every 20 days is a major, major drawback. To me, it is a regress

We can live with DRAM. Ok. But I cannot have my computer turned off for 3 weeks though? Or I lose data?

Well the SSD should have a built in battery capable of doing whats necessary for years.

Just like your computer has a CMOS battery that's capable of running the clock for years. It's no different. In fact, many computers will refuse to boot if the clock loses time because all the digital certificates on drivers aren't valid yet.

Computer requires battery backup to remain functional. SSD requires backup battery to remain functional. I don't see the difference.

Re: Micron's 232-layer NAND enables 2TB flash chips that deliver data 50% faster

#83
post #80

Amazing. Here we have a tier 2/3 company actually innovating, yet the engineers getting paid peanuts

How is Micron a "tier 2" company? They are probably the oldest surviving DRAM company and have always been in the TOP5. No idea about their payment, but i met some of the engineers who work there and they are extremely dedidcated. I don't think they are shopping around for other opportunities to maximize they pay, like it seems common in the bay area.

Branding.

Re: Micron's 232-layer NAND enables 2TB flash chips that deliver data 50% faster

#84
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see these as problems as long as software is smart enough. It merely requires the device to be always powered up (read: has a backup battery that can do periodic flash rewrites for 5 years). And it requires the controller to keep track of the current endurance of every page. A 'worn out' page can still hold data, it just holds either less data, or holds that data for fewer hours before needing to be rewritten…

>or double the ECC bits Are you aware of even a single ssd product allowing user to reconfigure capacity outside of obtaining secret/proprietary non public manufacturer service software? The only technical way for a drive to automagically shrink size on its own is by starting to mark TRIM freed sectors as BAD and hoping OS running on top will be able to recognize this and transfer BAD status to the filesystem - thats…

Drives internally do this with their reserved sectors. They also reallocate sectors between 'fast access' and 'long term storage', where the long term storage uses larger logical pages and hierarchical ECC, allowing a lower percentage of ECC overhead at the cost of performance.

At some point, I wouldn't be surprised if an SSD manufacturer releases a drive with a driver which can reduce the user-visible disk size as it ages. It would probably involve using a 'balloon file', in a similar way to Memory ballooning [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_ballooning

Re: Micron's 232-layer NAND enables 2TB flash chips that deliver data 50% faster

#85
post #64
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, human technological progress has come a long way! The human mind acclimates to improvements remarkably fast, and the joy found in such novelties tends to be fleeting and quickly fade as it becomes just another normal part of everyday life we take for granted (e.g. fancy new tech, or really anything new and nice). I like to frequently reflect on how amazing it is I am alive and even exist at all! Gratitude is tr…

> The human mind acclimates to improvements remarkably fast, and the joy found in such novelties tends to be fleeting and quickly fade as it becomes just another normal part of everyday life we take for granted This is why I am not afraid automation is going to render us without jobs. We're going to get accustomed with better, and still need to work. AI exponential increase can't keep up with human entitlement.

> still need to work

Us needing to work does not meant that the jobs will still be there for us to work at.

The reason so much money goes into automation is simply because it cuts the payroll. The argument that there have always been jobs in the past, so there will always be jobs in the future, simply does not follow..

Re: Micron's 232-layer NAND enables 2TB flash chips that deliver data 50% faster

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be a death knell for hard drives if they could actually get it that cheap (~$25/TB). In addition to obvious benefits for consumers, More and more in the enterprise space (which is the dominant buyer of HDD unit purchase volume) HDD's are being regulated to write few, read lots if not outright WORM, and focused on Sequential speeds. You can knock an order of magnitude of speed off modern NAND Flash and stil…

That depends on how much those supposed 50TB hard drives cost in four years. Though even if hard drive prices stay completely stagnant at $14/TB during sales, I'd still get a hard drive for videos and backups rather than pay $25.

> I'd still get a hard drive for videos and backups rather than pay $25.

So would everyone who's only motivation for buying storage is $/TB and nothing else. The vast majority of those people think 8 or even 80TB is alot and are pefectly happy with subpar drives being packaged in external usb enclosures. And there's nothing wrong with that, but that demographic of consumers is not the driving economic force in what gets developed, invested in, and brought to market.

HDD's ~$15/TB bargain values wont be sustainable if Enterprise drops HDD's for WORM/WFRM workloads because their TCO is too high (and many are). Disk shelves chew through Kilowatts like candy while capacious focused flash hosts seem comparatively allergic to electricity, and repairing/rebulding arrays on spinning rust compared to flash arrays alone is impetus enough for a lot of shops to dump rust and embrace solid state.

> That depends on how much those supposed 50TB hard drives cost in four years.

For sure. I'm highly skeptical they can pull that off in that time frame though. the pace of innovation in the HDD space is woefully lacking. They need a win like that, with competitive pricing, or the industries days are numbered. If they can pull it off though that's great. I'm all for cheaper/better storage options, even if it's mechanical (or optical or whatever).

Re: Micron's 232-layer NAND enables 2TB flash chips that deliver data 50% faster

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be a death knell for hard drives if they could actually get it that cheap (~$25/TB). In addition to obvious benefits for consumers, More and more in the enterprise space (which is the dominant buyer of HDD unit purchase volume) HDD's are being regulated to write few, read lots if not outright WORM, and focused on Sequential speeds. You can knock an order of magnitude of speed off modern NAND Flash and stil…

Not really sure about that. Isn’t the write endurance of hard dives still much higher than that of flash?

[deleted]

Re: Micron's 232-layer NAND enables 2TB flash chips that deliver data 50% faster

#89
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see these as problems as long as software is smart enough. It merely requires the device to be always powered up (read: has a backup battery that can do periodic flash rewrites for 5 years). And it requires the controller to keep track of the current endurance of every page. A 'worn out' page can still hold data, it just holds either less data, or holds that data for fewer hours before needing to be rewritten…

>or double the ECC bits Are you aware of even a single ssd product allowing user to reconfigure capacity outside of obtaining secret/proprietary non public manufacturer service software? The only technical way for a drive to automagically shrink size on its own is by starting to mark TRIM freed sectors as BAD and hoping OS running on top will be able to recognize this and transfer BAD status to the filesystem - thats…

You can use hdparm(8)'s --dco-setmax option to reduce the visible size of most SATA drives. This is not particularly useful for single drives — leaving unpartitioned space works just as well, assuming an OS that never writes to it — but it does stop TRIM-ignorant RAID controllers from potentially kneecapping SSD GC by "initializing" intentionally unused space.

Though I imagine most RAID controllers initialize with zeroes, and I hope SSD firmware doesn't reserve flash to store large extents of zeroed sectors, so this shouldn't be terribly useful for underprovisioning purposes. But without extensive testing or access to SSD firmware algorithms, it's hard to say.

Re: Micron's 232-layer NAND enables 2TB flash chips that deliver data 50% faster

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be a death knell for hard drives if they could actually get it that cheap (~$25/TB). In addition to obvious benefits for consumers, More and more in the enterprise space (which is the dominant buyer of HDD unit purchase volume) HDD's are being regulated to write few, read lots if not outright WORM, and focused on Sequential speeds. You can knock an order of magnitude of speed off modern NAND Flash and stil…

Not really sure about that. Isn’t the write endurance of hard dives still much higher than that of flash?

No. Premium flash (Write Endurance optimized flash) is far far far superior to HDD's for endurance and reliability. And modern flash controllers are far better at providing granular and detailed health statistics of cells/devices and allowing you to recover data from failing devices as well as far far faster at rebuilding or recovering data for array rebuilds/resilvers.

In the context of flash replacing HDD's, HDD's have already been regulated to Write Few, Read Many (WFRM), or even Write Once, Read Many (WORM) usecases, and flash has largely replaced spinners where write endurance is an important feature. This is true for consumers and enterprise. As such, a low write endurance flash drive isn't necessarily an inherent flaw. You have to be mindful that you can't just drop it into your databases as a hot spare (not if you expect good results anyway), but similar special use considerations are made for SMR spinners, so that's not exactly an atypical restriction, and is a flaw that still heavily favors flash.

Technically you can probably do more writes to an HDD than you could a 100 P/E cycle Endurance flash drive (that's 1/10th the endurance of a typical QLC NAND flash cell), but the HDD will be orders of magnitude slower and cost you several times as much in electricity just to idle, not to mention under load (again, we're talking capacious flash, not NVMe speed demons that suck down power). Given the usecase in question is specifically in scenarios where writes are already severely limited, the reduced write endurance of such NAND cells isn't really a drawback, especially given how much better they are at providing granular drive and cell health data to monitor device and array health, and how much faster/easier it is to do rebuilds/recovery with flash than spinning rust.

EDIT: To quantify how good flash is these days: Nearly all consumer flash and most non high-endurance enterprise flash drives typically have 0.5-1 DWPD of endurance. Entry level QLC flash (eg samsung 870 QVO) can be as low as 0.3 DWPD [0] but that's still pretty good compared to HDD's. DWPD Means that if you have a 1TB drive, you can write 500GB to 1TB everyday to that drive for 5 years before the drive fails. This is an MTBF, not a minimum lifespan, so YMMV but that's still very good. [1]

Meanwhile, HDD's are too slow to even do 1DWPD for the 20TB and up capacities, period. (keep in mind throughput for spinning disk degrades as physical data as allocated closer to the inner ring of the platter, so those >200MBps seq figures are unrealistic for full disk writes unless you plan to short stroke your drive which massively reduces capacity). And if it's SMR? lol. Even if you do short stroke them to give them the best possible chance, you're looking at about 15TBs maximum written per day theoretical for the best 3.5" spinners out there. Additionally, the main impetus for spinning disk failure is mechanical, not degradation of write medium like in flash, so while it's hard to do apples to apples testing, if your real world write workload works out to less than half a total disk per day, even basic bitch bargain bin flash that sabrent scraped off samsungs fab floor will last you the better part of a decade in 24/7 use. Let's not forget that HDD's will continue to degrade at idle by virtue of being mechanical, whereas the SSD will suffer very limited if any degradation in the same idle case.

High End Consumer/Entry level enterprise flash is 1-3DWPD. [2]

High Endurance enterprise flash is 5-10DWPD. [3]

The Endurance champion however is 100DWPD [4]

TL;DR: So setting money aside, HDD's really only beat SSD's (even cheap QLC ones) in small capacity ([0] Samsung 870 QVO: https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/internal-...

[1] Micron/Crucial MX500: https://www.crucial.com/ssd/mx500/CT2000MX500SSD1

[2] Samsung 980 Pro: https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/internal-...

[3] HGST SS530: https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library...

[4] Intel Optane P5800X: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/201840/...

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