This site may earn chapter commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

Today, Micron announced that its shipping the industry'south first QLC (quad-level cell) NAND SSD, starting immediately. That's a surprising move, for 2 reasons. Showtime, for many years it wasn't fifty-fifty clear if QLC NAND could ever be built. While TLC NAND commencement started shipping some years agone, the bug with TLC'south introduction on planar NAND (exemplified past drives like the Samsung 840 EVO), meant that TLC didn't really come into its own until the introduction of 3D NAND and the use of older process nodes to build the drives (40nm 3D NAND, compared with 20nm planar NAND). Secondly, when TLC arrived, information technology arrived in consumer products kickoff, but later taking the jump to enterprise products.

Micron, in contrast, is taking the leap for enterprise showtime, and planning a consumer introduction later.

QLC-NAND

As nosotros've previously discussed, in that location's an inverse relationship betwixt the number of program/erase cycles a drive can withstand and the number of bits information technology tin hold per cell. The more bits per jail cell, the greater the number of voltage levels, and the more than difficult it is to read data dorsum properly. This tends to slow down the bulldoze'southward write operation and reduces overall longevity.

Micron-Comparison

While Micron isn't giving u.s. much data on the specific capabilities of the 5210 Ion, it was willing to discuss the overall market for the bulldoze in more than detail. The Ion brand is specifically designed for drives with read-heavy workloads that'll perform minimal writes — and it's also intended for enterprise deployments, where the performance of QLC SSDs will still represent a meaning improvement over hard drives.

Micron-Endurance

Ane interesting indicate Micron fabricated to me when we spoke was that the endurance needs of SSDs are actually decreasing, in many areas, rather than increasing. At first glance, this might seem counterintuitive. After all, the corporeality of data we collectively create each year has been growing for years. As it turns out, however, more advanced operating systems that return more data on how much information is really written to drives per twenty-four hours in enterprise deployments has shown that the number of writes is lower, in some cases, than was previously thought.

Meanwhile, rapid growth in SSD capacities has meant that drives, generally speaking, are now much larger than they once were. This naturally decreases the number of drive writes per day that are practically going to be performed. We even referenced this idea before this year, when nosotros noted that Nimbus' 100TB SSD is so huge, y'all literally can't perform one bulldoze write per twenty-four hour period if y'all presume that the SSD maintains its maximum rated transfer speed 24 hours per day.

When you put these trends together, you've got a potentially large market for SSDs in industries that have historically still been using HDDs, or might only be using SSDs for caching. The Ion 5210 QLC isn't expected to replace TLC drives, only to serve every bit an adjunct to them, offer better than hard bulldoze operation; significantly higher bulldoze capacities, thanks to the 1.33x improvement in data stored per-cell; and a better overall toll tag compared with MLC or TLC drives over the long term. Micron isn't sharing more details than that at the moment, only the company has stated that it expects to give more information subsequently this year.

Now read: How Exercise SSDs Work?