Last Monday, May 21, Micron introduced the industry’s first QLC SSD for enterprise applications. Micron’s press release is HERE.
Although this is a laudatory feat, the industry has been headed in this direction for a number of years. In fact, this was the subject of a presentation that I made to the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) during its Winter Symposium in January 2014.
The slide in which I discussed this appears as this post’s graphic. (Click on it to see a larger rendition.) This table attempted to illustrate that all SSDs were headed towards TLC (and implicitly QLC) over the long term despite the fact that naysayers persistently argued that this could never happen. It looks at attitudes over history and considers the fact that things that the industry said could “Never” happen ended up eventually becoming the mainstream technology.
Since I live, eat, and breathe Continue reading “The Micron QLC SSD – No Surprises Here”
SSD-watchers have expressed some concern over the last few years that SSDs cannot be manufactured using advanced NAND flash process geometries. This is because these parts have lower endurance and a larger number of bit errors than NAND made using less-advanced processes – the tighter the process, the shorter the flash’s life, and the more errors it will have.