Solidigm – The company that Intel put up for sale following the sale of its solid state drive business hosted a technology day last week where the company shared some details about its future roadmap. The company appears to be focusing on 3D QLC NAND with its 192-layer offering that not only promises higher capacity drives but also enhanced QLC NAND endurance.
For example, Solidigm’s 30.72TB SSD is promising a PBW of about 32PB (Petabyte) of endurance, which uses what the company calls QLC Essential Endurance NAND.
However, it’s QLC Value Endurance NAND will again make possible a 61.44TB drive that is said to offer about 65PB of write endurance, but it should be noted that this is reached during 16KB aligned data or other types of light data writes.
So far, neither of these two types of NAND is suitable for consumer applications, as Solidigm only offers E1, E3 and U.2 forms for them. Regardless, this is already a huge step forward for 3D QLC NAND.
Solidigm hopes that its upcoming drives will be able to replace mechanical drives in the enterprise market segment. On top of that, Solidigm claims that it offers better throughput and latency compared to its competitors, and the first drives with the new 192-layer 3D QLC NAND are expected to be available sometime early next year.
