The 2016 Flash Memory Summit brought about the introduction of several new products and initiatives by the flash memory industry during keynote talks from Seagate, Samsung, Toshiba and Western Digital and 10 other companies. These included flash for archiving, very large SSDs, new flash memory architectures, NVMe and NVMe fabrics and emerging non-volatile memory technologies.
and 10 other companies. These included flash for archiving, very large SSDs, new flash memory architectures, NVMe and NVMe fabrics and emerging non-volatile memory technologies.
Vijay Rao from Facebook FB -0.8% was the kick-off keynote at the 2016 FMS looked at their initiatives to create hyperscale storage including their AVA high density flash initiative using M.2 flash memory SSDs for a very dense storage rack storage architecture. Jason Taylor from Facebook in a 2013 FMS keynote advocated flash for archiving. Vijay built upon this idea by talking about WORM data written on QLC (4 bit per cell) 3D NAND flash with a proposal for 100 TB SSD with low endurance (150 write cycles) targeted for archival applications.
Seagate introduced a 60 TB 12 Gb/s dual port SAS SSD in a 3.5-inch form factor as well as an 8 TB Nytro XP7200 NVMe SSD. This 60 TB SSD is the largest storage media around, exceeding 10 TB HDDs and magnetic tapes as well as 16 TB SSD introduced before the 2016 FMS. Seagate hinted that the capacity of this form factor SSD could grow even more in the future to provide 100 TB or more of data in the future.
In a briefing Seagate said that the 60 TB drive is targeted to large storage arrays, active archives and read intensive environments. This product will reduce host controller interfaces required and allows a 1 PB storage system using only 17 drives. The Seagate 8 TB Nytro PCIe SSD provides 10 GB/s data rates targeting high performance computing, big data analytics and database applications.
Samsung also introduced a new record sized SSD. Their 32 TB 2.5-inch form factor SAS SSD (PM1643), which the company said would be produced in 2017. Samsung also hinted that 100 TB SSDs in this form factor could be possible by 2020. Samsung’s big SSD uses the company’s fourth-generation 64-layer 3D V-NAND that results in a 64GB chip with a data rate of 800 Mbps. Samsung also introduced a 3 bit per cell 1 TB ball-grid array (BGA) SSD, weighing about 1 gram, aimed at compact laptops, tablet and other mobile devices. This device has sequential read speeds of 1,500 MBps and write speeds of 900 MBps.
Samsung announced 2 TB M.2 form factor SSDs and said that it will introduce an even smaller form factor product with up to 8 TB capacity in 2017. The company also announced and NVMe PCIe Gen4X8 SSD with up to 12 GB/s data rate by next year. Samsung also announced their Z-SSD that it said has the fundamental structure of V-NAND with a unique circuit design and controller that provides four times faster latency and 1.6 times better sequential read data rates than aconventional NVMe SSD. These were positioned as competition to Intel and Micron’s 3D XPoint memories. Like most of the other new SSDs, these will be generally available in 2017.
source:forbes
English (UK) 
简体中文