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back to article IMFT exposes its incredible shrinking NAND

NAND shrinks sounds like a way of describing flash psychoanalysts who sort out NAND neuroses as flash dies go a bit haywire. It actually refers to the shrinking process geometry size of cells in NAND manufacturing. Intel Micron Flash Technologies (IMFT) has just announced a 128Gbit capacity 20nm flash cell using 2-bit multi- …

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  1. Reginald Marshall
    Mushroom

    Any info on erase endurance?

    As NAND cells shrink, so does the number of erase cycles they can endure before wearing out. 25 nm should tolerate 3000-5000, what about 20 nm and below? High capacity is nice, having to toss a drive after a few months of moderate use... not so much.

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Your numbers are a tad under-rated sir

    The last time I read on the subject, SSD's built from current chips were expected to last many decades based on about 100,000 P/E cycles for commercially produced NAND chips. Check your math (or Wikipedia). That was in 2008, so I am sure they must last much longer now. In fact, the whole "erasure" scare is a bit of a myth. Most of us could never realistically do that many erase cycles anyway,

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    1. Ammaross Danan
      Reply Icon
      FAIL

      Missed

      "The last time I read on the subject, SSD's built from current chips were expected to last many decades based on about 100,000 P/E cycles for commercially produced NAND chips"

      There's a difference between referring to a "chip" as a whole, and what the OP to your comment was referring to: the erase-endurance of a particular 2-bit NAND cell, which does have 3000-5000 erase cycles at 25nm. However, when you take the whole drive into account (say 120GB), with decent wear leveling algorithms and such, it would take many years to burn through those erase cycles even pushing 7GB/day of data writes. And, of course, if you're using an SSD to edit uncompressed video or the like, you likely are a numpty or have enough money to toss your SSD once a year.

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      1. Wilco 1
        Reply Icon

        I doubt it

        Burning all 3000 erase cycles in a year means writing about a terabyte of data every day to a 120GB SSD. That's a LOT of video editing. So I doubt this an issue unless we're talking about professional editing.

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  3. Nexox Enigma

    How much market share?

    Looks like some how the 4 top NAND manufacturers have about 109.5% market share between them. I'm no economist, but that seems... wrong... to me.

    Also, everyone should stop worrying about write endurance. It's just not an issue with a modern (less than ~2 or 3 years old) SSD. You're more likely to suffer some low probability component failure on the drive which renders it useless than you are to see any problems with flash endurance. That's not true for cheap USB stick and SD card flash, which is (often) quite crap.

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