You better layer up, Micron's working on next-generation XPoint

Micron is working on two next-generation XPoint products, a new memory, and extending 3D flash beyond 64 layers. At an analysts' day it talked about its 3D NAND technology development. It is shipping its gen-1 3D NAND with 32 layers and 384Gb die capacity and moving towards its second generation with 64 layers and 256Gb …

[Joerg]

LTO tape drives are the best way to backup data.

LTO tape drives are the best way to backup data.

Just the cheapest and more reliable and they are very fast too.

Only fools would keep data backups on the cloud, business wise is just insane. There is a good reason why all data centers that make the cloud services have hundreds or thousands of LTO tape drives with robot units in expensive racks to quickly store petabytes of customers data.

[Androgynous Cow Herd]

What about NVMe?

Will Xpoint make NVMe architecture obsolete before it takes off?

[dikrek]

Re: What about NVMe?

NVMe is a protocol. 3D Xpoint is a way to build solid state storage.

For the fastest speeds, 3D Xpoint needs a memory interface anyway, not NVMe. But there are only so many DIMM sockets you can have, plus it's not like you can use a memory interface easily in order to connect hosts to arrays.

http://recoverymonkey.org/2016/12/09/practical-considerations-for-implementing-nvme-storage/

Disclaimer: I work at Nimble but this is a general media discussion.

Thx

D

[Gigabob]

Re: What about NVMe?

NVMe is needed as part of the architecture to get the most out of 3DXP and most any other solid state memory.

[Noah Monsey]

Re: What about NVMe?

NVME was designed for xpoint.

The article below explains the relationship between NVME and Xpoint.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/23/intel_planned_nvme_for_xpoint/

[Anonymous Coward]

a hint that we might hope to see QLC drives appear in 2018.

No thank you.

[Joerg]

Re: a hint that we might hope to see QLC drives appear in 2018.

QLC NAND.. please.. TLC sucks big time already. What will QLC expected life usage be then? 10TeraBytes read/write operations or less? Well.. probably even less than 2TB on most models.. so a 480GB SSD QLC NAND drive would die quickly.

SLC Enterprise class NAND are the only SSD NAND realiable enough to be really used.

MLC, TLC and then QLC can be used as long as the disk activity is very low. Reliability wise they are just plain useless.

[Alan Brown]

Re: a hint that we might hope to see QLC drives appear in 2018.

"What will QLC expected life usage be then? 10TeraBytes read/write operations or less?"

In a lot of applications at this scale data is written to the storage and rarely altered. This applies as much for SANs as for home systems.

The more important question becomes "what's the write speed?"