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Samsung's 256-gigabit chip puts multi-terabyte flash drives in your PC
Think that Samsung's 2TB solid-state drives are pretty capacious? They're just the start of something bigger. The Korean tech giant has started manufacturing the first 256-gigabit (32GB) 3D vertical flash memory, doubling its previous capacity record. The new tech should turn multi-terabyte SSDs into practical options for your home PC, and help phone makers cram more storage into tight spaces. You might get more bang for your buck, to boot -- Samsung's manufacturing is 40 percent more productive, so you likely won't pay twice as much for twice the headroom. The company plans to make this 256-gigabit flash through the rest of 2015, so you'll probably see it crop up in a lot of products (from Samsung and otherwise) over the months ahead.
Samsung's new consumer SSDs shoot to the top of the benchmark league
For the last year or so, Samsung has been touting a "paradigm shift" in the way it constructs flash memory: from a horizontal to a vertical arrangement of cells, or what it calls 3D V-NAND. Now, judging from reviews of the first V-NAND consumer SSDs, the 850 Pro range, it looks like this shift has resulted in a geniune and unequivocal boost to performance. Compared to synthetic and real-world scores from rival drives, made by the likes of Intel and Crucial, Sammy's 850 Pro "led the pack almost across the board," according to HotHardware.
Samsung ships first 3D vertical NAND flash, defies memory scaling limits
The main challenge in producing higher-capacity flash storage is one of scale -- as density goes up, so does cell interference and the chances of a breakdown. Samsung may have overcome that barrier (if temporarily) by mass-producing the first 3D vertical NAND memory, or V-NAND. Instead of putting memory cells on a conventional 2D plane, the company reworked its long-serving Charge Trap Flash technology to create a 3D cell structure with more breathing room. The result is flash that improves both reliability and speed at higher densities; Samsung claims that the new technology is 2-10X more reliable than its ancestors, and twice as quick at writing data. The initial V-NAND chip offers a 128-gigabit (16GB) capacity that we've seen before, but its underlying technique should scale quickly when a chip can include as many as 24 stacked cell layers. Although Samsung hasn't named the first devices with V-NAND inside, we won't be surprised if our next phone or SSD is particularly spacious.
