Story 2014-07-02 3PS Samsung releases 3D solid state drive

Samsung releases 3D solid state drive

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in storage on (#3PS)
story imageAnandtech reviewed the Samsung 850 Pro SSD that features a new 3D storage structure.
For years it has been known that the scalability of traditional NAND is coming to an end. Every die shrink has been more difficult than the previous as the endurance and performance have decreased with every node, making it less and less efficient to scale the size down.

By stacking transistors (i.e. cells when speaking about NAND) vertically, Samsung is able to relax the process node back to a much more convenient 40nm. When there are 32 cells on top of each other, it is obvious that there is no need for a 10nm-class node because the stacking increases the density, allowing production costs to scale lower. As we have seen with the history of NAND die shrinks, a higher process node provides more endurance and higher performance, which is what the 850 Pro and V-NAND is all about.
Although launching with a slight cost premium over traditional NAND, the benchmarks show that this drive is "without a doubt the best drive in the market" and the future of solid state drives.
Reply 8 comments

NAND (Score: 2)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-07-02 18:37 (#2AP)

Interesting article but I realized I don't know much about the subject. I had to look up NAND:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAND_gate talks about the digital logic circuit, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory shows how it's used in solid state storage. OK, now I get it.

Looks like this would make devices thicker, no?

Re: NAND (Score: 2)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2014-07-02 20:58 (#2AQ)

32 layers at 40 nanometers per layer is still very thin. :)

Re: NAND (Score: 2)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-07-02 21:36 (#2AR)

Ah, of course, I'm being stupid. Actually, what threw me off was the image associated with this article - looks like a pretty thick component relative to the thickness of your average "ultra-book" these days.

(bring back netbooks, goddammit!)

The problem with flash drives (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-07-03 08:34 (#2AW)

The problem with flash drives is that the information is encrypted with a key known only by the drive. So when this key is lost: bye bye data. Until those drives become more reliable i will stay away from them.

Re: The problem with flash drives (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-07-03 12:08 (#2AX)

So...when your spinning disk motor breaks how do you plan on recovering your data? Oh, backups? Cool, did you know that backups work just as well with SSDs?

Re: The problem with flash drives (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-07-03 13:52 (#2AY)

swap the platters to a new drive case & hardware in a cleanroom.

Re: The problem with flash drives (Score: 1)

by bradthegeek@pipedot.org on 2014-07-03 15:04 (#2B1)

For only $1000-$2000.
Could have had on-site and cloud backups for an order of magnitude less. For HDD or SSD

Re: The problem with flash drives (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-07-04 06:35 (#2BA)

Usually the controller breaks or the motor driver (Fireball :) ). And the usual fix is to buy a second hand drive of the same model and replace the electronic board on your hard drive.