During the Flash Memory Summit 2016 in Santa Clara, US, Toshiba has announced a new NAND technology that will bring 100TB+ SSDs, featuring QLC NAND with TSV technology.

Earlier this year, Toshiba has announced its partnership with Western Digital for production of the next-generation 3D NAND, the BiCS3 that will be using TSV (Through-Silicon Via) technology that uses vertical electrical connection that go directly through a silicon wafer or die.

The BiCS3 NAND has 64 superimposed layers and will first start with 256Gbit storage capacity, expanding to 512Gbit later. With QLC 4-bit 3D NAND, this will also raise the the number of "charge states" from eight on the TLC to sixteen on the QLC, thus also making the process more complicated and less reliable, which was the case with TLC NAND as well.

The TSV stacking and 512Gbit QLC 3D NAND showed by Toshiba, we will be looking at 2TB of capacity per package, resulting in single-sided M.2 SSD with capacity of 4TB or standard 2.5-inch SSDs reaching capacity of 32TB. Currently, Samsung has a 2.5-inch SSD with 15.36TB of capacity and Seagate already demonstrated a 60TB 3.5-inch SDD prototype.

Such high-capacity SSDs that could be introduced with QLC 3D NAND could provide much more performance than standard HDDs but due to the high price of NAND flash, the cost-per-terabyte is still high, although this could change in future.

Currently, Toshiba aims at 100TB SSDs with mass production of BiCS flash with TSV and 1TB per package capacity is expected next year, with possible products by the end of next year.





Source: Computerbase.de.