Micron has just announced their success to produce
Octa-NAND memory chips. With this, even bigger SSDs
might become possible. The current technology for
SSDs is QLC (Quad Level Cell) allowing 4 bits per cell.

Should Micron indeed be able to produce OLC (Octa-Level Cell) memory modules, then SSDs might become even cheaper at larger capacities. However a high yield is not yet to expect befor e the 2nd half of 2019.

Amazing though that OLC is already producable, as QLC has just been announced approximately a year ago. This would mean that Micron is breaking Moore’s Law when it comes to doubling speed/capacity of a component in a given timespan (usually a year).

But the question is, how reliable will OLC chips be as QLC already has to fight with faster wearoff than, say, TLC or MLC. We don’t mention SLC due to the fact that SSDs with a capacity of more than 1TB would cost a ridiculous amount of US$ and MLC modules have become very reliable in the past using the more modern production processes. Even TLC memory modules are now produced with a good reliability which has led to a massive price drop of High-capacity SSDs which also have tremendous speeds if used on PICe-based boards. Not less than 3,2GB read and 2,7GB write speeds can be achieved with TLC-based PICe-SSDs nowadays and all this at a mere 500 US$ for a 2TB model. With QLC the prices even drop to 400 US$ but then the wearoff level is increasing from 3000 write cycles to just 1000-1500 write cycles.

So whatever Micron is bringing up next, one thing is for sure: The customer might benefit from this when prices for SSDs might drop once again. It’s just a question of time until first manufactuirers of SSDs might use OLC chips once they become available. And durability tests might reveal how good the write-cycle wearoff ratio will be. A circumstance that might become interesting for users using large-size-SSDs in NAS systems for example.

Where today magnetic disks are still dominating the NAS section with disk sizes up to 16TB for 500 US$ per disk, maybe we will see similar NAS systems preconfigured with SSDs offering tremendous read/write speeds even via Ethernet networks as Gigabit chips don’t cost much nowadays and more modern network components already go for 10GbE!

Imagine a RAID5-based NAS still offering a whopping 1GB/s via Ethernet! Now THAT would be nice!