STORAGE SOLUTIONS SOLIDIFIED
Intel and Samsung duke it out
THIS TIME LAST YEAR, we predicted the future of non-volatile memory, and therefore SSDs, would be all about Intel’s 3D Xpoint and Samsung’s Z-NAND technologies. Fast-forward 12 months, and not much has changed, including the fact that we’re still largely talking about the future. Neither 3D Xpoint nor Z-NAND have yet made much impact in consumer-level PCs.
That said, Intel’s 3D Xpoint tech has become more widely available. Multiple generations and formats of drives based on 3D Xpoint and sold under the Optane brand have been released. We’ve had first-gen PCIe boards and M.2 cache cards replaced by second-gen products, while larger M.2 SSDs with just about enough capacity to run as primary drives have also been released. You could even argue that the mighty Intel 905p PCIe board is a third-gen product.
While Intel has made much progress, including refining its Optane controllers and algorithms, and bringing prices down, a limitation remains: Intel is still using first-gen 3D Xpoint memory chips. What’s more, the Intel and Micron venture that created 3D Xpoint is on borrowed time. The two will part ways toward the end of next year.
The companies say they will keep working together to release secondgen 3D Xpoint memory chips in the first half of 2019, following which their venture will be done. For now, almost nothing is known about that second-gen 3D Xpoint tech. But more capacity at a lower cost would address the main remaining reservation we have with Optane drives: They’re so expensive.
As for Samsung’s Z-NAND, we’ve yet to see one in our labs, and no consumer variants exist. Despite that, Samsung has announced a second generation of the tech. It includes new SLC Z-NAND that doubles the data density of its first Z-NAND chips to 128Gb, and a new MLC variant with a nifty 256Gb per chip. However, the first products based on this will still be pricey, with large drives aimed at enterprise applications, as opposed to everyday consumers, a market shored up by its 3D NAND applications, and 970 Pro and Evo drives.
What’s also unclear is the extent to which Samsung’s Z-NAND is protected by patents. Toshiba’s upcoming XL-Flash promises a very similar set of advantages as Z-NAND, including 10 times lower read latency than NAND. The overarching point involves competition. While Z-NAND and XLFlash don’t offer the same latency advantages as 3D Xpoint, they do promise to keep Intel on its toes.
How all that maps to SSDs isn’t entirely clear. However, SSD prices are at an all-time low going in to 2019, and with QLC or quad-level NAND flash ramping up, large drives are only going to get cheaper. Will we see the first sub-$100 1TB SSD from a big brand in 2019? Maybe. At the same time, second-gen 3D Xpoint memory chips, plus wider adoption of Samsung’s Z-NAND and perhaps Toshiba’s XL-Flash, should enable a new generation of lower cost ultrahigh performance SSDs. They still won’t be cheap, but it’s not hard to imagine a setup with something like a 250GB Optane OS drive and a 1TB SSD for mass storage being affordable by the end of the year. For most PC enthusiasts, however, 2019 will be about conventional NAND SSDs becoming cheaper than ever.