Intel to deliver Postville in August
Stamping out a 320GB 34nm SSD
Details of Intel's biggest solid-state drive so far, a 320GB part built on its 34nm process, are popping up across the web.
The current X18-M and X25-M models come in 80GB and 160GB capacities, use 2bits per cell multi-level cell (MLC) technology and are built on a 50nm process. The single-level cell (SLC - one bit per cell) technology X25-E goes faster and has 32GB and 64GB capacities.
Moving to a smaller process technology will enable more SSD dies to be made at a lower cost per die and a higher capacity. Previous reports have noted that Intel could announce doubled capacity SSDs in August and that Intel partner Micron has introduced flash chips using a 34nm process.
A Canadian RedFlagDeals technology website expects an announcement within a week and says there will be 80GB, 160GB and 320GB models. The consumer and mobile PC models will feature a 32MB wear levelling buffer, 90MB/sec sequential write performance, AES 128-bit Encryption, advanced NCQ Features with enhanced performance through status aggregation, and Advanced Smart Support, meaning improved drive statistics to monitor drive life.
Workstation and server models will additionally have a Power Safe write cache and, possibly, faster I/O speed.
RedFlagDeals suggests the 80GB models will be priced in the $276 - $261 area and says the new SSDs will be cheaper than the outgoing ones, being competitive with Samsung SSDs, and faster. Another etailing site suggests €205 for the 80GB X25-M Postville and €405 for the 160GB version, with delivery in up to ten working days.
We might expect generation 2 X25-M and X18-M 80GB, 160GB and 320GB models with 2bit MLC flash. Logically there would also be a gen 2 X25-E variant at 32GB, 64GB and now 128GB capacity levels using SLC flash. ®
COMMENTS
capacity not speed
The disk is used for capacity not speed; cache is used for speed not capacity. Many application files once they exceed MB they slow down the processor. But even the largest streamed video file will not require more than 1 GB, so I think the high-speed performance aspects of drives are overkill.
HD Manufacturers aren't lost.
Price of an SSD scales linearly with capacity. Price of an HD doesn't. It'll be quite a while before one can get a Terabyte of solid-state storage for the cost of an HD.
And I'm not optimistic that Moores law will last very much longer. You can't make smaller atoms. For that reason I don't anticipate Terabyte chips, ever.
BTW the best solid-state storage performance would not attach to a disk interface, it would be a card that plugs in to a PCI-X slot.. That's also a more natural manufacturing format for a big bunch of chips. And if HD manufacturers get optical write addressing working, the physical limits are hundreds of Terabytes per disk. (What would one do with a hundred Terabytes inside one's PC?)
My guess is that a future PC will have maybe 40-80Gb of solid-state storage soldered onto the motherboard and a hard disk as an option when the user needs larger amounts of local storage. A smart way to use the solid-state storage would be as persistent cache for a network filesystem. The problem with diskless workstations has always been that they forget everything when they are powered down and then thrash the network and the server when they power up.
RE: Even less endurance?
@anon
A couple of generations back, SLC was at over 1,000,000 raw writes per cell. Now we are at 100,000 - so yes there is a direct correspondance with the number of electrons per bit and how stable these are over time.
Maybe its not down to 1,000 but it will be lower than 10,000. With MLC drives today, performance is a lot lower than SLC - thus the number of writes you can do in 5 years reduces - however, the only reason that 'effective' lifetime can be 5 years is because of the over provisioning of the raw capacities - hence my comment re the need to over provision more. Look at some of the latest MLC devices - these have 50% effective capacity - vs much higher effective capacity on SLC devices.
I think we are in agreement however, SLC will become the standard requirement as dies shrink for the SSDs used to replace HDD, but MLC will continue to be driven by the consumer (mobile) requirements.
RE: Even less endurance? #
@Barry
MLC may understandably loose some endurance with smaller process geometries, but come on, an order of magnitude? 10,000 writes per cell goes to 1000? Hardly...
Also, MLC lifetimes on these drives have been calculated a million times, and the numbers I've seen are always ridiculously high in endurance e.g. you can write over the entire capacity of the drive every single day for 5+ years without issue.
Eventually, I'm sure the technology will have to change to new forms of memory storage, but even before then I'm sure SLC will just become the standard as dies continue to shrink.
Even less endurance?
The problem with another die shrink on the underlying NAND is that this further reduces "writes per cell" - with every generation an order of magnitude is lost.
While this is great for the mobile industry, much larger capacities in less space - its fine for iPods and phones where we tend to "write once" and read many - how many times do you delete an mp3 or a photo and then overwrite the blocks ? never?
In an disk drive however we are forever re-writing blocks. If endurance drops to <10,000 write per cell for these 32nm NAND, then you have to over-provision more and more - thus defeating the purpose of adding the extra capacity. Todays 45nm SLC NAND is the only real option for an enterprise drive - I wouldn't even like to put an MLC device in my desktop or laptop until we have hybrid SLC and MLC - so the disk itself can move stagnant data onto the MLC portion.
