tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post421828929371546414..comments2024-03-16T18:42:21.178-07:00Comments on DSHR's Blog: The Medium-Term Prospects for Long-Term Storage SystemsDavid.http://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comBlogger31125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-34146123573843288152019-04-06T14:41:53.395-07:002019-04-06T14:41:53.395-07:00I keep referring back to the 2009 paper from CMU, ...I keep referring back to the 2009 paper from CMU, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1145/1629575.1629577" rel="nofollow"><i>FAWN, the Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes</i></a>. Now, ten years on, <i>Storage Newsletter</i> points to <a href="https://doi.org/10.1109/EMPDP.2019.8671589" rel="nofollow"><i>Catalina: In-Storage Processing Acceleration for Scalable Big Data Analytics</i></a>, which from the abstract sounds very FAWN-like:<br /><br />"In this paper, we investigated the deployment of storage units with embedded low-power application processors along with FPGA-based reconfigurable hardware accelerators to address both performance and energy efficiency. To this purpose, we developed a high-capacity solid-state drive (SSD) named Catalina equipped with a quad-core ARM A53 processor running a Linux operating system along with a highly efficient FPGA accelerator for running applications in-place."David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-73740422573552437562018-06-01T06:36:46.286-07:002018-06-01T06:36:46.286-07:00The abstract for Blu-Ray Media Stability and Suita...The abstract for <a href="https://doi.org/10.1515/res-2017-0016%22" rel="nofollow"><i>Blu-Ray Media Stability and Suitability for Long-Term Storage</i></a> by Joe Iraci is not encouraging:<br /><br />"The most recent generation of optical disc media available is the Blu-ray format. Blu-rays offer significantly more storage capacity than compact discs (CDs) and digital versatile discs (DVDs) and thus are an attractive option for the storage of large image or audio and video files. However, uncertainty exists on the stability and longevity of Blu-ray discs and the literature does not contain much information on these topics. In this study, the stabilities of Blu-ray formats such as read-only movie discs as well as many different brands of recordable and erasable media were evaluated. Testing involved the exposure of samples to conditions of 80 °C and 85 % relative humidity for intervals up to 84 days. Overall, the stability of the Blu-ray formats was poor with many discs significantly degraded after only 21 days of accelerated ageing. In addition to large increases in error rates, many discs showed easily identifiable visible degradation in several different forms. In a comparison with other optical disc formats examined previously, Blu-ray stability ranked very low. Other data from the study indicated that recording Blu-ray media with low initial error rates is challenging for some brands at this time, which is a factor that ultimately affects longevity."David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-26779594278405894202017-10-04T09:49:56.519-07:002017-10-04T09:49:56.519-07:00Western Digital's HGST unit claims a record fo...Western Digital's HGST unit claims a <a href="https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/03/wdc_14tb_disk_drive_hs14/" rel="nofollow">record for the most bytes in a 3.5" drive</a>:<br /><br />"WDC has released an Ultrastar 14TB disk drive with host application software managing its shingled writing scheme.<br /><br />It is the world's first 14TB disk drive, and is helium-filled, as usual at these greater-than-10TB capacities. The disk uses shingled media recording (SMR) with partially overlapping write tracks to increase the areal density to 1034Gbit/in2. An earlier He10 (10TB helium drive), which was not shingled, using perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology, had an 816Gbit/in2 areal density, and the PMR He12 has a 864Gb/in2 one. Shingling adds 2TB of extra capacity over the He12."<br /><br />Note the relatively small 17% capacity increment from shingling.David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-44548176459771533042017-09-10T17:30:28.311-07:002017-09-10T17:30:28.311-07:00Ed Grochowski's fascinating presentation on th...Ed Grochowski's fascinating <a href="https://www.flashmemorysummit.com/English/Collaterals/Proceedings/2017/20170810_S302B_Grochowski.pdf" rel="nofollow">presentation on the history of hard disk technology</a> at the Flash Memory Summit includes density and price graphs that illustrate the slowdown in Kryder's Law. Tom Gardner's view of the history is <a href="http://sites.ieee.org/sv-techhist/?p=680" rel="nofollow">slightly different</a> but also worth your time.David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-79952876169242385972017-08-09T13:58:45.990-07:002017-08-09T13:58:45.990-07:00Chris Mellor at The Register reports that:
"...Chris Mellor at <i>The Register</i> <a href="https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/09/samsungs_128tb_ssd_bombshell/" rel="nofollow">reports that</a>:<br /><br />"Samsung has fired out four flashy announcements with higher capcity chips, faster drives, new packaging format and a flash version of Seagate's Kinetic disk concept."<br /><br />and that:<br /><br />"The fourth item in Sammy’s news blast was a Key Value SSD.<br /><br />...<br /><br />The Sammy "take" on this is that SSDs can store data faster and more simply if they take in a data object and store it as it is without converting it into logical blocks and mapping them to physical blocks. A data item is given a key which is its direct address, regardless of its size.<br /><br />Sammy says, as a result, when data is read or written, a Key Value SSD can reduce redundant steps, which leads to faster data inputs and outputs, as well as increasing TCO and significantly extending the life of an SSD."David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-2550296612743495312017-07-25T08:57:45.260-07:002017-07-25T08:57:45.260-07:00At The Register, Chris Mellor's report Quad go...At <i>The Register</i>, Chris Mellor's report <a href="https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/25/western_dig_climbs_on_4bitscell_flash_wagon/" rel="nofollow"><i>Quad goals: Western Digital clambers aboard the 4bits/cell wagon</i></a> reveals that:<br /><br />"Western Digital's 3D, 64-layer NAND is being armed with 4bits/cell (quad-level cell, QLC) and bit-cost scaling (BiCS3) technology. ... WD will have QLC SSD and removable drives on show at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara next month. ... WD expects that its in-development 96-layer 3D NAND will come in QLC form as well."David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-53713351164103907622017-06-15T07:33:16.822-07:002017-06-15T07:33:16.822-07:00At The Register, Chris Mellor's IBM will soon ...At <i>The Register</i>, Chris Mellor's <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/14/spectralogic_foresees_ibm_becoming_the_sole_tape_drive_supplier/" rel="nofollow"><i>IBM will soon become sole gatekeepers to the realm of tape – report</i></a> reports on <a href="https://www.spectralogic.com/wp-content/uploads/white-paper-digital-data-storage-outlook-2017-v2.pdf" rel="nofollow">Spectra Logic's <i>Digital Data Storage Outlook 2017</i></a>. Overall, Spectra Logic comes to conclusions similar to mine about the bulk storage segment of the market:<br /><br />"3.5-inch disk will continue to store a majority of enterprise and cloud data requiring online or nearline access if, and only if, the magnetic disk industry is able to successfully deploy technologies that allow it to continue the downward trend of cost per capacity"<br /><br />and:<br /><br />"Tape has the easiest commercialisation and manufacturing path to higher capacity technologies, but will require continuous investment in drive and media development. The size of the tape market will result in further consolidation, perhaps leaving only one drive and two tape media suppliers"<br /><br />and:<br /><br />"No new storage technologies will have significant impact on the storage digital universe through 2026 with the possible exception of [storage class memories]"David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-62961748310410814702017-06-14T01:13:23.618-07:002017-06-14T01:13:23.618-07:00At Tom's Hardware, Chris Ramseyer's Flash ...At <i>Tom's Hardware</i>, Chris Ramseyer's <a href="http://www.tomshardware.com/news/consumer-optane-enterprise-ssd-market,34631.html" rel="nofollow"><i>Flash Industry Trends Could Lead Users Back to Spinning Disks</i></a> is an important analysis of the impact of flash technology's evolution to TLC and 3D:<br /><br />"The goal is to push the technology into more devices and increase market share over HDDs. The push for market share has decreased the divide in performance between flash and spinning disks."<br /><br />Doing this means:<br /><br />"the trend has been to slow performance to reduce costs. The more the technology is neutered, the closer to hard disk performance we see. On the controller side we've seen the number of processor cores and channels from each controller to the NAND flash shrink. On paper the new flash is faster than the old flash, so it's possible to achieve the same performance with fewer channels, but the larger die sizes also give us less parallelization. On the flash side, the move to more cost efficient 3-bit per cell (TLC) has delivered less sustained performance for heavy workloads that take longer to complete."<br /><br />The impact is bigger on endurance:<br /><br />"Vertically stacked TLC does increase endurance over planar 2D TLC, but the gain isn't as high as you might expect. We had two engineers tell us at Computex that Micron 64-layer TLC carries between 1,000 and 1,500 P/E cycles using their testing models. The Micron 256Gbit (Gen 2) TLC is still early but it's not a good sign for users. Neither Toshiba nor Micron want to discuss endurance with us at the die level; all endurance talk comes at the device level, where powerful error correction technology plays a large role. Planar MLC devices didn't use LDPC, an advanced form of error correction technology, but the controllers did run less powerful BCH ECC."<br /><br />and on write bandwidth:<br /><br />"The <a href="http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-600p-1tb-ssd-review,4979.html" rel="nofollow">Intel SSD 600p</a> is a very good indicator of the performance users will see in future . The drive features 3D TLC paired with a low-cost NVMe controller. In our reviews of the series we found the performance to be better than any SATA SSD ever shipped for most users, but the sustained write performance is lower than even mainstream SATA SSDs with MLC flash."<br /><br />This is an inevitable evolution. Gradually, as storage class memories such as Optane enter the market, flash will lose out at the highest-performance segment of the market. Cost-per-byte will become more important and performance less important as flash gets pushed down towards the bulk storage segment.David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-35666145226247721182017-05-27T17:24:46.387-07:002017-05-27T17:24:46.387-07:00Via Catalin Cimpanu, Vulnerabilities in MLC NAND F...Via <a href="https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/hardware/ssd-drives-vulnerable-to-attacks-that-corrupt-user-data/" rel="nofollow">Catalin Cimpanu</a>, <a href="https://people.inf.ethz.ch/omutlu/pub/flash-memory-programming-vulnerabilities_hpca17.pdf" rel="nofollow"><i>Vulnerabilities in MLC NAND Flash Memory Programming: Experimental Analysis, Exploits, and Mitigation Techniques</i></a> by Yu Cai and a team from CMU, ETH Zurich and Seagate reports on:<br /><br />"two sources of errors that can corrupt LSB data, and characterize their impact on real stateof-the-art 1X-nm (i.e., 15-19nm) MLC NAND flash chips. The first error source, cell-to-cell program interference, introduces errors into a flash cell when neighboring cells are programmed, as a result of parasitic capacitance coupling ... The second error source, read disturb, disrupts the contents of a flash cell when another cell is read."<br /><br />The first allows for an attack similar to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer" rel="nofollow">Rowhammer</a> attack on DRAM, and the second allows an attack in which a rapid flow of read operations causes read disturb errors. <a href="https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/hardware/ssd-drives-vulnerable-to-attacks-that-corrupt-user-data/" rel="nofollow">Cimpanu writes</a>:<br /><br />"these read disturb errors will "corrupt both pages already written to partially-programmed wordlines and pages that have yet to be written," ruining the SSD's ability to store data in a reliable manner in the future."David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-41885134615431416662017-05-26T10:27:54.076-07:002017-05-26T10:27:54.076-07:00The good Dr. Pangloss would be delighted with Seag...The good <a href="http://blog.dshr.org/2016/03/dr-pangloss-loves-technology-roadmaps.html" rel="nofollow">Dr. Pangloss</a> would be delighted with <a href="http://www.pcworld.com/article/3162084/storage/seagates-roadmap-includes-14tb-16tb-hard-drives-within-18-months.html" rel="nofollow">Seagate's latest optimistic roadmap</a>:<br /><br />"Seagate is getting closer to reaching its goal of making 20TB hard drives by 2020.<br /><br />Over the next 18 months, the company plans to ship 14TB and 16TB hard drives, company executives said on an earnings call this week."David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-22639782878505926112017-05-04T09:36:44.326-07:002017-05-04T09:36:44.326-07:00At IEEE Spectrum, Marty Perlmutter's The Lost ...At <i>IEEE Spectrum</i>, Marty Perlmutter's <a href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/it/the-lost-picture-show-hollywood-archivists-cant-outpace-obsolescence" rel="nofollow"><i>The Lost Picture Show: Hollywood Archivists Can’t Outpace Obsolescence</i></a> is a great explanation of why tape's media longevity is irrelevant to long-term storage:<br /><br />"While LTO is not as long-lived as polyester film stock, which can last for a century or more in a cold, dry environment, it’s still pretty good.<br /><br />The problem with LTO is obsolescence. Since the beginning, the technology has been on a Moore’s Law–like march that has resulted in a doubling in tape storage densities every 18 to 24 months. As each new generation of LTO comes to market, an older generation of LTO becomes obsolete. LTO manufacturers guarantee at most two generations of backward compatibility. What that means for film archivists with perhaps tens of thousands of LTO tapes on hand is that every few years they must invest millions of dollars in the latest format of tapes and drives and then migrate all the data on their older tapes—or risk losing access to the information altogether.<br /><br />That costly, self-perpetuating cycle of data migration is why Dino Everett, film archivist for the University of Southern California, calls LTO “archive heroin—the first taste doesn’t cost much, but once you start, you can’t stop. And the habit is expensive.” As a result, Everett adds, a great deal of film and TV content that was “born digital,” even work that is only a few years old, now faces rapid extinction and, in the worst case, oblivion."David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-70596669833906991962017-04-10T11:16:26.197-07:002017-04-10T11:16:26.197-07:00Chris Mellor at The Register reports that SK Hynix...Chris Mellor at <i>The Register</i> reports that <a href="https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/10/72layer_flash_cake_from_sk_hynix/" rel="nofollow">SK Hynix has 72-layer flash</a> but at double the cell size of its competitors, so the capacity isn't that impressive.David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-82660585923273748162017-03-31T23:14:31.428-07:002017-03-31T23:14:31.428-07:00More analysis of Intel's Optane product announ...More analysis of Intel's Optane product announcement in Chris Mellor's <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/29/intel_optane/" rel="nofollow"><i>Inside Intel's Optanical garden</i></a>.David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-12648719346558029552017-03-20T09:08:55.550-07:002017-03-20T09:08:55.550-07:00Chris Mellor and Simon Sharwood try to make sense ...Chris Mellor and Simon Sharwood try to make sense of the deliberately opaque performance numbers in <a href="https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/19/optane_ssd_released/" rel="nofollow">Intel's announcement of their P4800X</a> XPoint-based NVMe SSD. Still extremely expensive and in very limited supply.David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-43880386276607700532017-03-14T11:14:20.103-07:002017-03-14T11:14:20.103-07:00Lucas123 at /. points me to Lucas Mearian's Wh...<a href="https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/03/13/2149200/laptop-ssd-capacity-to-remain-flat-as-nand-flash-dearth-causes-prices-to-rise" rel="nofollow">Lucas123</a> at /. points me to Lucas Mearian's <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/article/3180176/data-storage/why-laptops-wont-come-with-larger-ssds-this-year.html" rel="nofollow"><i>Why laptops won’t come with larger SSDs this year</i></a>:<br /><br />"A dearth in NAND flash chip supply will cause the prices of mainstream solid-state drives (SSDs) to leap by as much as 16% this quarter over the previous quarter, meaning laptop makers won't likely offer consumers higher capacity SSDs in their new systems, according to <a href="http://press.trendforce.com/press/20170313-2776.html#DLvyeTlICQxiOzBi.99http://press.trendforce.com/press/20170313-2776.html" rel="nofollow">a report</a> from market research firm DRAMeXchange.<br /><br />On average, contract prices for multi-level cell (MLC) SSDs supplied to the PC manufacturing industry are projected to go up by 12% to 16% compared with the final quarter of 2016; prices of triple-level cell (TLC) SSDs are expected to rise by 10% to 16% sequentially, according to DRAMeXchange."<br /><br />This illustrates the point I made in <a href="http://blog.dshr.org/2016/09/where-did-all-those-bits-go.html" rel="nofollow"><i>Where Did All Those Bits Go?</i></a> that supply and demand for storage are in balance, when demand rises but supply does not, prices rise to maintain the balance. And also the point that a huge wave of flash is not going to displace HDDs any time soon. Mearian writes:<br /><br />"The SSD adoption rate in the global notebook market is estimated to reach 45% this year, according to DRAMeXchange."David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-91402643389802957372017-02-17T12:31:46.952-08:002017-02-17T12:31:46.952-08:00CHris Mellor at The Register reports on a "no...CHris Mellor at <i>The Register</i> reports on a <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/17/oracle_streamline_tape_library_future/" rel="nofollow">"no comment" from Oracle</a> that casts doubt on the future of the T10000 tape format:<br /><br />"There is now doubt over the continuing life of Oracle's StreamLine tape library product range. Customers cannot assume that the products will be developed or that Oracle's proprietary <a href="https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/12/oracles_titanic_tape_drive/" rel="nofollow">T10000 tape format</a> has a future.<br /><br />The obvious strategy is to transition to the open LTO format, which has a <a href="https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/16/lto_has_15tb_gen_7_tape_format/" rel="nofollow">roadmap</a> from its current LTO-7 format (6TB raw, 15TB compressed) ... another stage in the long decline of tape as a backup and archive storage medium."David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-85378547159393139012017-02-12T16:36:02.240-08:002017-02-12T16:36:02.240-08:00Peter Bright at Ars Technica reports on the specs ...Peter Bright at <i>Ars Technica</i> reports on the <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/specs-for-first-intel-3d-xpoint-ssd-so-so-transfer-speed-awesome-random-io/" rel="nofollow">specs for Intel's first XPoint-based SSD</a>. As predicted above by the <a href="http://thessdguy.com/why-3d-xpoint-ssds-will-be-slow/" rel="nofollow">SSD Guy</a>, they fall far short of marketing hype:<br /><br />"while these numbers do represent improvements on NAND flash, they're a far cry from the promised 1,000-fold improvements."David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-91594318652704216702017-02-08T16:03:10.986-08:002017-02-08T16:03:10.986-08:00AT The Register, Chris Mellor reports the French v...AT <i>The Register</i>, Chris Mellor reports the French video streaming site <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/08/dailymotions_object_storage_odyssey/" rel="nofollow">Dailymotion is using OpenIO nano-servers</a>.David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-91040293593274592652017-02-05T07:12:01.734-08:002017-02-05T07:12:01.734-08:00At The Register, Chris Mellor reports on Micron...At <i>The Register</i>, Chris Mellor reports on <a href="https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/03/micron_working_on_nextgeneration_xpoint/" rel="nofollow">Micron's analysts' day</a>. Key quotes:<br /><br />" It is shipping its gen-1 3D NAND with 32 layers and 384Gb die capacity and moving towards its second generation with 64 layers and 256Gb capacity in a 59mm2 die size. More than half its bit output in the second half of 2016 went into 3D NAND, which means planar, 2D NAND is now falling away."<br /><br />and (optimistic):<br /><br />"During 2017 Micron will work on developing QLC (quad-level cell or 4bits/cell flash) with a third more capacity than equivalent tech TLC flash. However, QLC flash will have lower endurance (write cycles essentially) and slower access than TLC flash, making it only suitable for read-intensive applications. ... We could be looking at making realtime analysis of archival data more affordable. ... Toshiba and WD also have a focus on QLC flash, which gives us a hint that we might hope to see QLC drives appear in 2018."<br /><br />and (more realistic):<br /><br />"The semiconductor incursion into storage is growing in strength and depth. If it can provide affordable and reliable bulk capacity storage then, quite simply, disk technology will go the way of tape technology over the next couple of decades."David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-72351746255866019902017-01-31T08:46:36.117-08:002017-01-31T08:46:36.117-08:00Bad news for the future of optical storage media i...Bad news for the future of optical storage media is implied by Cyrus Farivar's <a href="https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/01/sony-takes-977m-writedown-movies-have-been-flops-dvds-sales-falling/" rel="nofollow"><i>Sony missed writing on the wall for DVD sales, takes nearly $1B writedown</i></a>:<br /><br />"Sony has finally figured out what the rest of us already knew—people just aren’t buying physical media like they used to.<br /><br />In a Monday statement to investors, the company attributed the “downward revision… to a lowering of previous expectations regarding the home entertainment business, mainly driven by an acceleration of market decline.”<br /><br />...<br /><br />“The decline in the DVD and Blu-ray market was faster than we anticipated,” Takashi Iida, a Sony spokesman, told <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-30/sony-says-it-will-take-1-billion-writedown-on-movie-business" rel="nofollow">Bloomberg News</a>."David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-32409633503190328612017-01-18T14:29:26.488-08:002017-01-18T14:29:26.488-08:00Yet another illustration of the seductive power th...Yet another illustration of the seductive power the idea of quasi-immortal media has over the minds of people who don't understand the actual problems of preserving data is Richard Kemeny's <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/01/human-knowledge-salt-mine/512552/" rel="nofollow"><i>All of Human Knowledge Buried in a Salt Mine</i></a>.David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-63337786821522802572017-01-16T06:50:23.235-08:002017-01-16T06:50:23.235-08:00Another Storage Class Memory technology has starte...Another <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/16/crossbar_reram_chips_sampling/" rel="nofollow">Storage Class Memory technology has started sampling</a>, albeit only in a 40nm process:<br /><br />"ReRAM startup Crossbar has sample embedded <a href="http://www.electronics-eetimes.com/news/crossbar-reram-production-smic/page/0/2" rel="nofollow">ReRAM chips from SMIC</a> that are currently undergoing evaluation.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/16/wd_says_resistance_is_not_futile/" rel="nofollow">SMIC</a> is using a 40nm process and there are plans for a 28nm process in development but Crossbar envisages scaling at least to 16nm and 10nm but then lower.David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-21797311153321854612017-01-03T09:29:27.141-08:002017-01-03T09:29:27.141-08:00Chris' report also validates the argument that...<a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/03/3d_nand_flood_coming_down_the_yangtze/" rel="nofollow">Chris' report</a> also validates the argument that the Chinese are investing strategically:<br /><br />"48.96 per cent of YMTC is owned by China's National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, the Hubei IC Industry Investment Fund, and the Hubei Science and Technology Investment Group."David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-30286603833542575782017-01-03T06:59:41.220-08:002017-01-03T06:59:41.220-08:00Chris Mellor at The Register reports:
"YMTC,...<a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/03/3d_nand_flood_coming_down_the_yangtze/" rel="nofollow">Chris Mellor at <i>The Register</i> reports</a>:<br /><br />"YMTC, through its ownership of contract chip manufacturer XMC, has started building a memory semiconductor fab on a 13-hectare site at the Donghu New Technology Development Zone in Wuhan. ... the fab would soak up $24bn in investment. ... This will be the largest memory plant in China and include three 3D NAND production lines. Volume production should start in 2018, with a run rate of 300,000 12-inch wafers a month by 2020."<br /><br />$8B per fab line supports the estimates above. Note that this development is less than 10% of the capacity needed to displace hard disk if it were on stream immediately instead of in 2020.David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-8694151783919064522016-12-30T09:45:01.834-08:002016-12-30T09:45:01.834-08:00Toshiba, the distant third in the disk market, is ...Toshiba, the distant third in the disk market, is in <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-toshiba-accounting-options-analysis-idUSKBN14I12J" rel="nofollow">much worse financial trouble</a> than the big two. The disk business isn't the major problem:<br /><br />"Faced with the prospect of a multi-billion-dollar writedown that could wipe out its shareholders' equity, Japan's Toshiba is running out of fixes: it is burning cash, cannot issue shares and has few easy assets left to sell.<br /><br />The Tokyo-based conglomerate, which is still recovering from a $1.3 billion accounting scandal in 2015, dismayed investors and lenders again this week by announcing that cost overruns at a U.S. nuclear business bought only last year meant it could now face a crippling charge against profit."<br /><br />David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.com