I'm so hyped for QLC drives. I don't doubt that when consumer available they'll be 1000 P/E cycles, at least. But regardless, I'm looking forward to buying a bunch of drives for my bulk storage. I don't even use 3.5" HDDs anymore in my whitebox server build.
Couldn't get more wrong if you tried, Anton - every techie is waiting and salivating at the prospect of replacing their platter storage with flash. Despite flash's price premium, drives like this should be cheap enough that some will take that plunge, and this will only accelerate until we get to the tipping point where platters are consigned to history.
I'm still worried about cold, un-powered storage. I know that data retention problems were exaggerated, but they were still real. Even in the idea cases, an unpowered SSD will only retain data for a few years. I suspect that spinning platters will still have some use.
But do you have 4TB of data that needs to be on an SSD? Things where access times don't matter (media etc) don't really need an SSD. Overkill is, IMO, the correct word. Most large file size things don't need an SSD, so a large SSD is overkill for consumers.
Silent operation and no moving parts would be a positive for QLC. I'd pay a bit of a premium for it, considering the trouble I go through using anti vibration stuff on my HDDs. Granted, I am a bit of a niche market, not being able to put my file server where no one is bothered by its noise. But still. People pay a premium for the portability of 2.5" HDDs after all.
Every PC I build gets quieter at idle/low load (full tilt gaming more or less the same). It's to the point where I have to research what fan a PSU uses. The HDD can be isolated to shut it up a lot, but it would be nice to just be able to say goodbye (except for the occasional back-up to an external HDD).
Why stop at idle? The mechanical hard drives are the loudest part of my PC even at full load thanks to a custom loop water cooler. Fortunately they are just bulk/cool storage so most of the time they are spun down and the 1 TB SSD handles everything else.
I suppose I could use a drive like this for my steam library where games could benefit from better loading times without tying up more expensive/reliable MLC on the primary drive. Games don't care if the random and or write performance is terrible, they are almost entirely sequential read by nature (which is why they work fairly well even on mechanical drives). Although since my internet is fast enough to download even 50 GB games in less than 15 minutes I don't need to store them all locally anyway, I can just grab them on demand.
If you are willing to pay there are up to 600W fanless PSUs, I have one in my 8800 machine and a 420W in the 3770. Combine that with all SSDs and the only noise I typically hear are the 970’s fans during gaming.
I’d kill for this drive if it was cheapish, I always need more space and I won’t buy mech drives anymore except for bulk, offline storage - hard to pass on 8gb for $150 for backup purposes.
Fans in PSUs today are quieter than the rattling of mechanical hard drives, especially considering said fans don't even spin at all if you have a half-decent brand.
If you hear the gpu fans then what's the point of going fanless in the 1st place. Yes, HDD's are the biggest offender in noise but a PSU? Even my cheapo Seasonic S12-II Bronze is basically silent when my HDD's are the main noise offender and even disconnecting them I only hear electric noise, not my PSU fans.
I'd settle for slightly cheaper 2TB TLC SATA drives, I'm running 2x 1TB EVOs for my day to day stuff and when I bought them a couple years ago I thought 2TB would've easily dropped below $350 by now... But then the NAND shortage hit. At least they're finally coming down a little, MX500 and the WD/SD have been at $450 for a while now...
wait.... weren't we always told that 3D NAND would be built on Godzilla large (aka, olde) nodes and would have *better* P/E counts????? bait and switch???
And it is as you say, for 3 bit per cell, TLC 3D NAND. But QLC adds another bit, which means 16 voltage states to read/write and keep track of, instead of 8 for TLC. Bait and switch only for people who don't read things.
For planar NAND, the smallest node I'm aware of QLC being made on was 43nm, and that was only good enough for use in memory cards, not SSDs. So 3D NAND is providing significant improvements to both endurance and capacity even for QLC. But QLC is still fundamentally not a high-endurance technology no matter what manufacturing node you use.
it is bait and switch if this 500 count is the first reveal for 3D QLC. I certainly don't recall reading that 3D QLC would reverse the P/E count from TLC.
"I certainly don't recall reading that 3D QLC would reverse the P/E count from TLC. "-"Bait and switch only for people who don't read things." There's your problem then. Apart from reading about it, if you just think about it, it would be clear. TLC NAND released with 1k PE cycles at 2xnm. With QLC you gain only 33% storage, but you double your voltage states. 15nm TLC was about the cut off line for 2D NAND I think. They officially probably had 2K PE cycles for SSDs and maybe less for USB sticks and stuff. With 3D stuff, all I read is that you are in the 40nm region these days. So you are much larger, but not too much so, where it wouldn't matter anymore. All this knowledge combined with the fact that PE cycles went from about 100k to 10k when moving from SLC to MLC (2 voltage states vs 4 voltages states) and your math should work out to that early production QLC is very volatile and even later stage QLC might not be iron steel tought for years to come. Considering that my 500GB 840 (Gen1 TLC) did less than 40TB writes over 5.5 years functioning as my system and gaming drive (meaning 80PE cycles as long as we don't count write amplification), I'm pretty excited for this tech.
Interesting but I'm wary of data retention. Once you increase SSD capacity, it becomes tempting to use it for less used data like we use to do now, huge HDD alongside an SSD. HDDs are great for archiving as you only usually kill the drive heads/electronics but not the platters.
Good for M.2 laptops as it will provide capacity at a small footprint.
FFS bring on the PLC (then HLC?) drives. Let's just make reliability worse and worse to chase greater GB/dollar. I'd still get SLC drives if I could find them and I am not liking how hard it is becoming to find MLC drives
Those test are only using the cache part of the SLC, another story would be if you go with a 10-20-40GB test were the "SLC" cache is rendered useless and performance will drop to hell.
Is there really a large market among consumers for this ? I have seen chinese ssds selling for £25 for 120gb £45 for 240 etc so this will have to have some mighty cost reductions , better than the 33% increase in capacity would suggest. And dram less? doesn't that automatically increase the wear ratio
"Maxio’s prototype drive is based on the MAS0902A-B2C DRAM-less controller"
Sorry, QLC and DRAMless is a horrible idea. QLC needs plenty of DRAM and SLC or XPoint cache. Then it is a great tech. In 3 years everybody in value markets will be on QLC. And why would QLC and 96 (or 128 etc) layers be exclusive of each other?
Is there an application that can give R/W summaries to a disk per program, or an online resource that gives typical disk usage totals for various programs under normal use, it would be nice to have something that lets you plug in your disk type and a program and see what the (conservative) longevity for that drive will be based on what it is used for...
For example on a new (moderate budget + gaming focused) build right now I would get something along the lines of an NVMe 512GB 3D TLC drive for system and a SATA 1TB drive as a steam/gog/origin/uplay library drive... maybe soon to be replaced with a QLC based SATA drive?
Right now win10 is the biggest offender with tons of hidden updates/hidden updates for spyware, browsers too updating their db files and other things. At least on firefox you can change the rate the data is rebuilt/saved from every 15secs to something like 5-10mins.
That's the way I went with my current build a couple years ago, 256GB SM951 (AHCI version but NVMe didn't change things drastically for it) for the OS plus a 1TB SATA EVO for daily stuff, added a second one when they were dropping darn near $300... Didn't think it'd take years for 2TB SATA drives to drop < $400, heh.
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CheapSushi - Saturday, June 9, 2018 - link
I'm so hyped for QLC drives. I don't doubt that when consumer available they'll be 1000 P/E cycles, at least. But regardless, I'm looking forward to buying a bunch of drives for my bulk storage. I don't even use 3.5" HDDs anymore in my whitebox server build.milli - Saturday, June 9, 2018 - link
JMicron, right? Another rename from Maxiotek?The_Assimilator - Saturday, June 9, 2018 - link
Maxiotek is JMicron's former SSD division, yes.Ian Cutress - Saturday, June 9, 2018 - link
Maxiotek is now Maxio Technology for all intents and purposes outside China. We confirmed with them.The_Assimilator - Saturday, June 9, 2018 - link
"4 TB SATA drive is an overkill for consumers"Couldn't get more wrong if you tried, Anton - every techie is waiting and salivating at the prospect of replacing their platter storage with flash. Despite flash's price premium, drives like this should be cheap enough that some will take that plunge, and this will only accelerate until we get to the tipping point where platters are consigned to history.
Mikewind Dale - Saturday, June 9, 2018 - link
"where platters are consigned to history."I'm still worried about cold, un-powered storage. I know that data retention problems were exaggerated, but they were still real. Even in the idea cases, an unpowered SSD will only retain data for a few years. I suspect that spinning platters will still have some use.
Notmyusualid - Sunday, June 10, 2018 - link
@ MikewindYes, my gut instinct follows your thinking.
Lonyo - Saturday, June 9, 2018 - link
But do you have 4TB of data that needs to be on an SSD? Things where access times don't matter (media etc) don't really need an SSD. Overkill is, IMO, the correct word. Most large file size things don't need an SSD, so a large SSD is overkill for consumers.Death666Angel - Saturday, June 9, 2018 - link
Silent operation and no moving parts would be a positive for QLC. I'd pay a bit of a premium for it, considering the trouble I go through using anti vibration stuff on my HDDs. Granted, I am a bit of a niche market, not being able to put my file server where no one is bothered by its noise. But still. People pay a premium for the portability of 2.5" HDDs after all.Alexvrb - Sunday, June 10, 2018 - link
Every PC I build gets quieter at idle/low load (full tilt gaming more or less the same). It's to the point where I have to research what fan a PSU uses. The HDD can be isolated to shut it up a lot, but it would be nice to just be able to say goodbye (except for the occasional back-up to an external HDD).IndianaKrom - Sunday, June 10, 2018 - link
Why stop at idle? The mechanical hard drives are the loudest part of my PC even at full load thanks to a custom loop water cooler. Fortunately they are just bulk/cool storage so most of the time they are spun down and the 1 TB SSD handles everything else.I suppose I could use a drive like this for my steam library where games could benefit from better loading times without tying up more expensive/reliable MLC on the primary drive. Games don't care if the random and or write performance is terrible, they are almost entirely sequential read by nature (which is why they work fairly well even on mechanical drives). Although since my internet is fast enough to download even 50 GB games in less than 15 minutes I don't need to store them all locally anyway, I can just grab them on demand.
Icehawk - Sunday, June 10, 2018 - link
If you are willing to pay there are up to 600W fanless PSUs, I have one in my 8800 machine and a 420W in the 3770. Combine that with all SSDs and the only noise I typically hear are the 970’s fans during gaming.I’d kill for this drive if it was cheapish, I always need more space and I won’t buy mech drives anymore except for bulk, offline storage - hard to pass on 8gb for $150 for backup purposes.
The_Assimilator - Sunday, June 10, 2018 - link
Fans in PSUs today are quieter than the rattling of mechanical hard drives, especially considering said fans don't even spin at all if you have a half-decent brand.Lolimaster - Monday, June 11, 2018 - link
If you hear the gpu fans then what's the point of going fanless in the 1st place. Yes, HDD's are the biggest offender in noise but a PSU? Even my cheapo Seasonic S12-II Bronze is basically silent when my HDD's are the main noise offender and even disconnecting them I only hear electric noise, not my PSU fans.Oxford Guy - Wednesday, June 13, 2018 - link
If you can hear one lady yelling at you why worry about two more?ImSpartacus - Saturday, June 9, 2018 - link
Yeah, I'd consider a 4TB drive if the cost/GB was competitive.Impulses - Monday, June 11, 2018 - link
I'd settle for slightly cheaper 2TB TLC SATA drives, I'm running 2x 1TB EVOs for my day to day stuff and when I bought them a couple years ago I thought 2TB would've easily dropped below $350 by now... But then the NAND shortage hit. At least they're finally coming down a little, MX500 and the WD/SD have been at $450 for a while now...Oxford Guy - Wednesday, June 13, 2018 - link
No. 640K is enough for anyone.Pork@III - Saturday, June 9, 2018 - link
What is the description of misery?- Intel ...
sheh - Saturday, June 9, 2018 - link
Yeah, QLC sounds scary.FunBunny2 - Saturday, June 9, 2018 - link
wait.... weren't we always told that 3D NAND would be built on Godzilla large (aka, olde) nodes and would have *better* P/E counts????? bait and switch???Death666Angel - Saturday, June 9, 2018 - link
And it is as you say, for 3 bit per cell, TLC 3D NAND. But QLC adds another bit, which means 16 voltage states to read/write and keep track of, instead of 8 for TLC. Bait and switch only for people who don't read things.Billy Tallis - Saturday, June 9, 2018 - link
For planar NAND, the smallest node I'm aware of QLC being made on was 43nm, and that was only good enough for use in memory cards, not SSDs. So 3D NAND is providing significant improvements to both endurance and capacity even for QLC. But QLC is still fundamentally not a high-endurance technology no matter what manufacturing node you use.FunBunny2 - Saturday, June 9, 2018 - link
it is bait and switch if this 500 count is the first reveal for 3D QLC. I certainly don't recall reading that 3D QLC would reverse the P/E count from TLC.Death666Angel - Saturday, June 9, 2018 - link
"I certainly don't recall reading that 3D QLC would reverse the P/E count from TLC. "-"Bait and switch only for people who don't read things."There's your problem then. Apart from reading about it, if you just think about it, it would be clear. TLC NAND released with 1k PE cycles at 2xnm. With QLC you gain only 33% storage, but you double your voltage states. 15nm TLC was about the cut off line for 2D NAND I think. They officially probably had 2K PE cycles for SSDs and maybe less for USB sticks and stuff. With 3D stuff, all I read is that you are in the 40nm region these days. So you are much larger, but not too much so, where it wouldn't matter anymore. All this knowledge combined with the fact that PE cycles went from about 100k to 10k when moving from SLC to MLC (2 voltage states vs 4 voltages states) and your math should work out to that early production QLC is very volatile and even later stage QLC might not be iron steel tought for years to come. Considering that my 500GB 840 (Gen1 TLC) did less than 40TB writes over 5.5 years functioning as my system and gaming drive (meaning 80PE cycles as long as we don't count write amplification), I'm pretty excited for this tech.
zodiacfml - Sunday, June 10, 2018 - link
Interesting but I'm wary of data retention. Once you increase SSD capacity, it becomes tempting to use it for less used data like we use to do now, huge HDD alongside an SSD. HDDs are great for archiving as you only usually kill the drive heads/electronics but not the platters.Good for M.2 laptops as it will provide capacity at a small footprint.
MamiyaOtaru - Sunday, June 10, 2018 - link
FFS bring on the PLC (then HLC?) drives. Let's just make reliability worse and worse to chase greater GB/dollar. I'd still get SLC drives if I could find them and I am not liking how hard it is becoming to find MLC drivesLolimaster - Sunday, June 10, 2018 - link
The new "SLC" is now called optane to some degree.Notmyusualid - Sunday, June 10, 2018 - link
My Intel SLC drive is still going strong, in a 3rd system.shabby - Sunday, June 10, 2018 - link
Nothing wrong with qlc, plc, hlc, 7lc, olc as long as the price is right. I wouldn't mind a high tb/low write ssd for archiving to replace hdd's.Lolimaster - Sunday, June 10, 2018 - link
Those test are only using the cache part of the SLC, another story would be if you go with a 10-20-40GB test were the "SLC" cache is rendered useless and performance will drop to hell.dromoxen - Sunday, June 10, 2018 - link
Is there really a large market among consumers for this ? I have seen chinese ssds selling for £25 for 120gb £45 for 240 etc so this will have to have some mighty cost reductions , better than the 33% increase in capacity would suggest. And dram less? doesn't that automatically increase the wear ratiopeevee - Sunday, June 10, 2018 - link
"Maxio’s prototype drive is based on the MAS0902A-B2C DRAM-less controller"Sorry, QLC and DRAMless is a horrible idea. QLC needs plenty of DRAM and SLC or XPoint cache. Then it is a great tech. In 3 years everybody in value markets will be on QLC.
And why would QLC and 96 (or 128 etc) layers be exclusive of each other?
WatcherCK - Sunday, June 10, 2018 - link
Is there an application that can give R/W summaries to a disk per program, or an online resource that gives typical disk usage totals for various programs under normal use, it would be nice to have something that lets you plug in your disk type and a program and see what the (conservative) longevity for that drive will be based on what it is used for...For example on a new (moderate budget + gaming focused) build right now I would get something along the lines of an NVMe 512GB 3D TLC drive for system and a SATA 1TB drive as a steam/gog/origin/uplay library drive... maybe soon to be replaced with a QLC based SATA drive?
Lolimaster - Monday, June 11, 2018 - link
Right now win10 is the biggest offender with tons of hidden updates/hidden updates for spyware, browsers too updating their db files and other things. At least on firefox you can change the rate the data is rebuilt/saved from every 15secs to something like 5-10mins.Impulses - Monday, June 11, 2018 - link
That's the way I went with my current build a couple years ago, 256GB SM951 (AHCI version but NVMe didn't change things drastically for it) for the OS plus a 1TB SATA EVO for daily stuff, added a second one when they were dropping darn near $300... Didn't think it'd take years for 2TB SATA drives to drop < $400, heh.