3D NAND – The SSD Guy Blog

WDC: No SSD/HDD Crossover

Those who have been reading posts on The SSD Guy blog for some time have often heard me explain that SSD prices will not fall below HDD prices anytime soon. Last week Western Digital shared a roadmap that shows that we can expect for there to be a sizeable price gap between the two technologies at least through 2028.

Let me stop for a moment to point out that Western Digital Corp, or WDC, no longer has any reason to take sides in the HDD vs. SSD battle now that the company has acquired SanDisk, a leading SSD maker. Even before that, WDC’s HGST business has been the market leader in SAS SSDs for a number of years. WDC doesn’t take sides in arguments about SSDs vs. HDDs. Instead the company stands ready to sell whichever one the customer finally decides to use.

This post’s graphic comes from a chart that WDC used on October 11 when introducing its new MAMR head technology, which the company expects to propel HDD capacities up, and HDD price per terabyte down, for a number of years. To create this chart WDC’s HDD team joined forces with the SanDisk flash team to project both HDD and NAND price per terabyte for the next 11 years. The most important conclusion is that Continue reading “WDC: No SSD/HDD Crossover”

Toshiba Reveals Restructuring Plans

On Friday Toshiba revealed its restructuring plans aimed at returning the company to profitability and growth through management accountability.

Of special interest to The SSD Guy was the fact that the company will refocus its semiconductor and HDD businesses, currently called the “Semiconductor & Storage Products Company” partly by giving it a new name: “Storage & Electron Devices Company”. This division will focus on the semiconductor group’s good prospects and profitability while maintaining a focus on the fact that SSDs and HDDs share a business. In the not-too-distant past Toshiba has run these two businesses separately.

The group plans to be “A pillar of income with Memories as a core business”. To achieve this, Toshiba has stated that it will enhance its NAND cost competitiveness by accelerating development of BiCS (Toshiba’s 3D NAND technology) and by expanding the SSD business. There are three parts to this Continue reading “Toshiba Reveals Restructuring Plans”

Comparing Samsung’s Planar and V-NAND SSDs

Samsung recently introduced its 3D V-NAND-based 850 SSD which, according to The Tech Report, uses the same MEX controller as the company’s 3-bit planar SSD, the 840, introduced last year.

Samsung said in its keynote speech at the 2013 Flash Memory Summit that V-NAND consumes an average of 27% less power and runs at least 20% faster than its planar counterpart in an SSD application, all while providing ten times the endurance. It’s only natural to assume that this would allow designers to produce a V-NAND SSD that would significantly outperform its planar NAND counterpart.

The SSD Guy had an opportunity to review Continue reading “Comparing Samsung’s Planar and V-NAND SSDs”