Huge Reliability from Tiny NAND

Since introducing our 34nm NAND nearly a year ago, we’ve made big  strides in both performance and reliability. Now, nearly all of our NAND products are built on 34nm—leading the industry in density and efficiency.

In fact, our 34nm process is so solid, we’ve even moved our super-high cycling Enterprise NAND parts to it. We just announced 34nm SLC and MLC Enterprise NAND parts that can hit 300,000 and 30,000 cycles, respectively. These new parts deliver unmatched density, cost-efficiency, and reliability and will open up new potential for NAND storage in enterprise applications.  Watch my quick explanation below to understand why.

Beyond MLC NAND: Some Perspective

There has been quite a buzz in the industry lately about NAND flash products that are capable of storing more than two bits per cell, so I wanted to just take a minute and provide our perspective.

Simply put–what ultimately matters is having the lowest cost-per-bit solution in volume production at a given moment in time, not how many bits per cell are stored. Now, that said, there’s no question that being able to store more bits per cell results in lower cost.  However, there are some serious trade-offs that we think make this option not viable at this time.  Most notably–performance and reliability suffer.  In fact, we estimate that the performance (measured in write-cycle throughput) for going from two to three bits per cell using the same NAND architecture and process technology could be as much as halved. And reliability, (measured in write-cycle endurance) could be up to an order of magnitude worse (yes—up to 10x worse).  Scary stuff. Because having a product that may have a lower bit cost, but doesn’t meet today’s level of performance and reliability limits the value of that product.  It’s also worth noting the greater burden on the system implementation of going beyond today’s well-understood MLC technology, such as making sure the controller provides adequate ECC coverage.

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Enterprise-Class NAND: Coming to a Server Near You

Hey guys. The MAST folks asked me to get the blog up to speed on a very exciting announcement—our Enterprise NAND. In a nutshell, Enterprise NAND is a very high endurance SLC NAND device.  It has a write/erase cycle endurance of 1 million cycles. Seriously cool–that’s 10X standard NAND. So, what does it mean? Well, it means that NAND, in its various flavors, can play and perform in everything from thumb drives to performance SSDs and now, it also has a home in high endurance, high-transaction applications like data servers. And with the kinds of endorsements it’s getting from the likes of Sun Microsystems and Violin memory, I think we’re seeing NAND really come into its own. Anyway, check out the short video and the announcement for more info.

HDD & SSD Counseling: “Prunes are Great!”

Unlike an SSD that has a measured and graceful life span–with time to coordinate a retirement, HDDs often die with absolutely no warning. And this traumatic event often takes our most valuable information to the grave. Our fifth “Counseling Session” video allows us to lament with poor HDD, as he mourns the nature of his mortality and worries about his own impending, and unpredictable, demise.

HDD & SSD Counseling: “I like calling it nappy-time …”

HDDs crash. We’ve all experienced it. In fact, in the largest study of its kind, Google found that HDDs crash even more often than their manufacturers predict … and once an HDD has demonstrated an error, it’s likely to fail again–soon. In this third installment of our ”Counseling Sessions“ videos, we continue to have a bit of fun at HDD’s expense and learn how devastating an HDD crash can be.

HDD & SSD Counseling: “How long was I out?”

We talk a lot about the things that differentiate solid state storage from traditional spinning platters—be it at the enterprise level or in the laptop right in front of me. Perhaps as a relief to that intense level of focus, we made a series of videos to have some fun with the performance issues in HDDs. Of course, in reality, these are real challenges. But in this short vignette, it’s all fun and games as a counselor questions an HDD about some personal problems he’s been having lately.