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

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91–100 of 131 posts

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

#91
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 ze…

This is one layer too high - ssd firmware has no way of knowing your intentions purely from filesystem/sector activity.

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

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes. Flash can’t be stored unused for long periods without losing data.

That's what tape is for and not the usecase in question.

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

#93
post #81
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

You can reserve space by setting host protected area (HPA). There are even people theorizing this might add provisioning are to an SSD https://www.thomas-krenn.com/en/wiki/SSD_Over-provisioning_u... . But so far there is zero evidence for it. HPA is not a magic nobody touches area, its an area reserved for special superuser use and no Drive will simply start reusing it for its own internal processes.

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

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not really. If I go look at some 20TB hard drives, I see them promising 1.5 to 2.5PB of endurance. On the other hand there are 4TB SSDs promising 5PB of endurance. In full drive writes that's 75-125 vs. 1250. Even if you ignore the hard drive warranty, I'd say the maximum reasonable workload is a constant write at 50% of the minimum transfer speed. At that speed you might get over 1000 writes, depending on drive size…

Samsung rates their QVO (QLC flash) at about 0.36 DWPD for 5 years which works out to over 600 disk mean writes before failure. Even if we half that that's still easily 3x high end HDD's, with superior drive health monitoring and far superior recovery/rebuild performance. TLC Flash is 2-3 times higher than that, and exact endurance depends on the specific drive in question as there's more to endurance than single/double/triple/quadruple bit layering.

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

#95

At what point will the wear resistance be so low from increasing the layers (and bits) per cell that flash becomes effectively write-once, read many (WORM)?

I would actually love that. I need fast random access to data that never changes. SSDs are an overkill and too expensive, HDDs are too slow

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

#96
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rem…

That's an extremely load-bearing "should"; are any current drives shipping like this?

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

#97
post #76

Why is micron constantly first to market with new high density nand, but their market share doesn’t reflect their progress. Unless I’m miss informed.

Neither does the stock outperform. It's almost like investing in a commodity market (which doesn't seem that outlandish given the reach of storage now)

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

#98
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I envy you. All I read there was "write endurance and data retention halved again"

I have no idea why you'd read that when the cells are the same size as before.

That outcome would be expected from either decreasing cell size, or increasing bits/cell (what used to be commonly called SLC/MLC/TLC/QLC).

I don't see TFA mentioning either directly, but there are some hints that one of the two (or both) did happen: Number of layers increased from 176 to 232 (that explains 32% increase) but bits/chip area has doubled (total density increased by 100%). Where does the rest of this increase coming from, you reckon?

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

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. If I go look at some 20TB hard drives, I see them promising 1.5 to 2.5PB of endurance. On the other hand there are 4TB SSDs promising 5PB of endurance. In full drive writes that's 75-125 vs. 1250. Even if you ignore the hard drive warranty, I'd say the maximum reasonable workload is a constant write at 50% of the minimum transfer speed. At that speed you might get over 1000 writes, depending on drive size…

Samsung rates their QVO (QLC flash) at about 0.36 DWPD for 5 years which works out to over 600 disk mean writes before failure. Even if we half that that's still easily 3x high end HDD's, with superior drive health monitoring and far superior recovery/rebuild performance. TLC Flash is 2-3 times higher than that, and exact endurance depends on the specific drive in question as there's more to endurance than single/dou…

It seems to me like initially people were worried about SSD endurance but now nobody seems to care anymore, because endurance hasn't turned out to be a significant issue. In fact, I suspect developers care a lot less about I/O patterns now because 1) the performance impact of bad I/O patterns is still high, but the performance floor is way higher on SSDs, so it basically "doesn't matter" for most 2) for end-user applications, user's don't hear your I/O any more, so how are they going to notice?

For example, I have this C:\ SSD on a Windows 10 machine, which has accrued more than 100 TBW (>400 drive writes) in 2-3 years [1], which is pretty much only possible if the system is writing all the time to it (and it is). That's not something you would have done in the spinning rust days, simply because the constant crunchy hard drive noises would have annoyed people.

[1] And whaddaya know, that SSD still says it's got 70 % more life in it, so it's probably good for some five years of this, at which point the average PC will go into the dumpster anyway. Success achieved.

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

#100
post #56
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to go even that far. The minimum hardware requirements for Microsoft Windows 95 were: A personal computer with a 386DX, 20MHz or higher processor, 4MB of memory (8MB recommended) At least 70MB of available hard disk space for installation A hard drive at the time, had 250-500MB space. Not even 1GB (that was a luxury), This not even 1/4000 of this small chip. So, you have stack 4000 of those Windows 95…

Honestly, what I think is more amazing is how far we didn’t come given the enormous increase in processing power. Windows 95 was pretty good for it’s time, but windows 11 isn’t essentially different.

Except for:

- Kernel was modularized in the MinWin project

- A C++ subset is now used in kernel as well (see WIL library), since Vista

- COM, and now WinRT, took over the role of Longhorn ideas, now done with C++ instead of .NET

- Virtualization is now used to protect key kernel areas (see kernel data protection)

- Focus on user space drivers

- The GUI stack has been rewritten multiple times

One can program Windows 11 like Windows 95, but there are plenty of APIs being missed, it just happens to work thanks to Microsoft's way of dealing with backwards compatibility

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