Micron and Intel have been working on 3D NAND Flash memory for quite a long. Meanwhile it looks like Micron/Crucial is just about to be ready to release the first consumer drives based on such NAND chips.

The first SSD, which are using 3D NAND from Intel/Micron will be consumer drives from Crucial, which is Microns consumer brand. There are going to be 2.5 inch as well as M.2 SSDs, whereas the first features up to 2 Terabyte capacity and the latter 1 Terabyte in the case of a single sided M.2 drive. Crucial is planning to launch its 2.5 inch consumer SSDs during the second quarter 2016 and the M.2 cards should arrive in the third quarter 2016.

Digging a bit deeper we find that Crucial will stick to Controllers from Silicon Motion (SMI). Such chips can already be found on the yet successful Crucial BX100 (SM2245EN) as well as the BX200 (SM2256). So far we expect Crucial to launch 3D MLC based drives using the SM2246EN controller. Apart from that there might be two different variants, where one features 3D MLC and the other 3D TLC NAND flash memory. In the case of MLC the NAND features up to 256 Gigabit storage density and regarding TLC 384 Gigabit is achieved. 3D MLC as well as TLC NAND flash chips from Intel/Micron will be based on a 32 layer design. Maybe already later this year or otherwise at the beginning of next year 48 layer 3D NAND from Intel/Micron will hit the market.

It’s good to see that there is more competition arising in the SSD market. These days Samsung does hold a technological lead, since the company has officially launched its 3D-V-NAND well over a year ago. For the end customer this competition will mean that prices for SSD will continue dropping in 2016 as well as in 2017 and maybe we will even see some affordable high-capacity drives (4TB+) by the end of 2016.











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