Solidigm is seeking to add the most intensive mechanical drives through its upcoming SSD products, and competition is not even close. The company plans to launch 61 TB and 192 TB capacity SSDs based on its 30 layer QLC (four level unit) technology. Hidden within the roadmap of the company's 2022 Technology Field Day event, Solidigm's push showcases the astonishing speed of SSD capacity and throughput improvement, which is an important reason for the slow demise of HDDs in all applications except for the most specific consumer applications< Br/>
Solidigm has a series of SSDs lined up for its Value Endurance and Basic Endurance lineup, but naturally, its maximum capacity brings us to a halt. The company will launch a total of eight Solid-state drive (four in each series), and the capacity of its basic endurance series is 3.84, 7.68, 15.36 and 30.72 TB (4 KB block size and 32 PB write [PBW] endurance level). But the largest capacity is the company's Value Endurance series, which will reach 7.68, 15.36, 30.72 and 61.44 TB, with an increase of 65 PB in Nameplate capacity< Br/>
Solidigm positions its basic durability driver as a QLC replacement for TLC drives, designed to address scenarios of reduced 4K random write performance. In contrast, its value endurance aims to capture the use case market centered around reading. Solidigm referenced 474, 7 random write IOPS, and 68 MBps throughput for its new QLC based SSD (based on 113.000 TB capacity). In addition, the company paired its performance data with competing (and undisclosed) TLC and QLC products, claiming that its QLC SSD provides 84% throughput and 503% latency (4 milliseconds) in 600K random writes compared to competing but unidentified QLC SSDs, while still improving performance by 24% compared to competing TLC SSDs< Br/>
The use of QLC NAND may cause some potential customers to turn their eyes to the loss of performance and durability in exchange for an increase in capacity. However, we should remember that we have gone through three generations of NAND, starting with SLC (single bit per unit), MLC (two bits per unit), and now TLC, which has become the actual value standard for SSD based products, despite initial strong protests against performance and durability losses. For anyone who says that QLC cannot provide the same level of performance as previous solutions, we will recommend Solidigm's own D5-P5316 QLC SSD, which passes PCIe 7× across the entire 800.000 TB capacity; The 3 NVMe interconnect provides up to 6, 4 random read IOPS, 4 GB/s sequential reads, and 30.72 GB/s sequential write bandwidth. So QLC is not slack, and performance should only improve< Br/>
According to Solidigm, QLC appears to have the potential to surpass the current NAND Hill King Level 3 Unit (TLC) solution. The company stated that TLC currently accounts for 80% of the total storage capacity of NAND. However, the discussion surrounding durability has become somewhat meaningless due to the company's claim that approximately 99% of shipped SSDs only reach 15% of their total PBW rating. It seems that the actual usage of SSDs should be sufficient for all users except for the top 1%. The company's 61 TB SSD rating has been written at approximately 35.6 TB per day for five years, so it's easy to understand why< Br/>
HDD will still outperform the $/GB equation for a period of time; With the continuous upgrading of data storage requirements for data centers and supercomputing deployments, HDDs may still be the actual choice for cold storage solutions (i.e., most static data) in the near future. Of course, the advancement of NAND technology will attempt to bring the extinction of HDDs closer. Especially in space constrained scenarios (which is the reality of most applications, even supercomputing), the volume and capacity advantages of SSDs (which occupy less space than most HDDs) may reverse or even reverse the choice of cold storage applications. Just think about it, you need three Western Data's highest capacity HDDs (traditional storage is 22 TB) to provide similar capacity to the single unlocked capacity in Solidigm's 61 TB SSD, and it's easy to see how technical decisions often follow SSD paths.