During the Solidigm event at Tech Field Day 2022, the company discussed its roadmap for their SSD technology, unveiling up to 61 TB SSD capacities.
Solidigm is developing new QLC SSD drives to push the boundaries of memory capacity higher than the current storage solutions
Technically, two drives will be presented in the future that is manufactured using the fourth generation 192-layer OLC 3D NAND proprietary technology, which the company calls "Essential Endurance and Value Endurance," reports the website Blocks & Files. The fourth Gen 192-L QLC Essential Endurance SSD offers a majority drop-in of 4KB aligned, a minute capacity size of almost 4 TB and as large as 32 TB (which is four times higher than previous solid state drives), a maximum PBW of ~32 (8KB random endurance, and comes in three form factors — E1.S, E3.S and U.2.
The "Value Endurance" model offers a write alignment and block size of 16KB and ≥16KB aligned, an 8 TB minimum capacity size with a maximum of 64 TB, a maximum PBW of ~65, and also comes in three forms — E1.L, E3.S, and U.2.
Solidigm will replace the TLC NAND, which offers three bits per cell and is offered in almost eighty percent of most flash drives on the market, with the newest QLC as a replacement shortly. The pricing on the QLC Value Endurance drives may turn customers to their product as a cost-friendly memory TLC replacement, especially when working in high-capacity workloads. However, the company does note that the QLC SSD is not as ideal for mixed R/W workloads that are more minute in size.
The two capacities offered by Solidigm in the future are higher than what is currently seen in the marketplace. Western Digital provides the highest standard HDD with a total of 22 TB and their SSD with a capacity of 26 TB.
Stephen Foskett, the host at Tech Feild Day, tweeted his thoughts about the new Solidigm QLC drives:
For example this QLC 30 TB drive could sustain 70 years of sequential video writes, as discussed by @Solidigm at #SFD24 pic.twitter.com/g6a9ZC1wLh
— Stephen Foskett (@SFoskett) November 3, 2022
While we do not know the precise interconnect utilized, the upcoming Solidigm drives offer as much as 113,000 random write IOPS with 474 MBps transfers. Solidigm does state during the presentation that the competition offers less than the company, but it is still less than some would find satisfactory.
The new Solidigm 4th Gen PCIe 4.0 QLC drives will arrive in the upcoming first half of next year.
News Sources: Blocks and Files, Stephen Foskett (@SFoskett on Twitter)
