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Today, Micron appear that its shipping the industry's get-go QLC (quad-level cell) NAND SSD, starting immediately. That's a surprising motion, for two reasons. Kickoff, for many years it wasn't even articulate if QLC NAND could always be congenital. While TLC NAND commencement started shipping some years ago, the problems with TLC's introduction on planar NAND (exemplified by drives like the Samsung 840 EVO), meant that TLC didn't actually come into its own until the introduction of 3D NAND and the use of older process nodes to build the drives (40nm 3D NAND, compared with 20nm planar NAND). Secondly, when TLC arrived, it arrived in consumer products starting time, only later taking the spring to enterprise products.

Micron, in contrast, is taking the leap for enterprise get-go, and planning a consumer introduction later.

QLC-NAND

As we've previously discussed, there's an inverse relationship between the number of program/erase cycles a drive can withstand and the number of $.25 it can hold per prison cell. The more bits per jail cell, the greater the number of voltage levels, and the more difficult it is to read data back properly. This tends to slow downwardly the bulldoze'south write performance and reduces overall longevity.

Micron-Comparison

While Micron isn't giving us much information on the specific capabilities of the 5210 Ion, it was willing to talk over the overall market for the drive in more than detail. The Ion brand is specifically designed for drives with read-heavy workloads that'll perform minimal writes — and it'south besides intended for enterprise deployments, where the operation of QLC SSDs will still represent a significant comeback over hard drives.

Micron-Endurance

Ane interesting point Micron made to me when we spoke was that the endurance needs of SSDs are actually decreasing, in many areas, rather than increasing. At start glance, this might seem counterintuitive. After all, the amount of information we collectively create each yr has been growing for years. Equally information technology turns out, however, more advanced operating systems that return more information on how much data is actually written to drives per day in enterprise deployments has shown that the number of writes is lower, in some cases, than was previously idea.

Meanwhile, rapid growth in SSD capacities has meant that drives, by and large speaking, are now much larger than they one time were. This naturally decreases the number of drive writes per day that are practically going to be performed. We even referenced this idea before this year, when we noted that Nimbus' 100TB SSD is then huge, you literally can't perform ane drive write per day if you assume that the SSD maintains its maximum rated transfer speed 24 hours per day.

When you put these trends together, y'all've got a potentially large market for SSDs in industries that accept historically yet been using HDDs, or might only be using SSDs for caching. The Ion 5210 QLC isn't expected to replace TLC drives, but to serve equally an adjunct to them, offering better than hard drive performance; significantly higher drive capacities, thank you to the one.33x improvement in data stored per-cell; and a meliorate overall price tag compared with MLC or TLC drives over the long term. Micron isn't sharing more than details than that at the moment, but the company has stated that it expects to give more information later this year.

At present read: How Do SSDs Work?