Samsung V-NAND Flash Memory To Address Growing Data Storage Needs

Although our devices are getting smaller and our appliances getting smarter, the amount of data we produce have grown immensely. As such, it is even more critical to find ways to store all that data without having to expand the amount of physical space that servers and racks already occupy. Samsung, best known for smartphones and consumer electronics, might just have the data storage solution for those as well. It has just revealed a series of data storage solutions whose high capacities are all thanks to Samsung's new V-NAND tech.

NAND (short for Not-AND) flash memory is the most common type of solid state memory in use today, from the internal storage in smartphones to the SSDs inside laptops and desktops. With the rare exception of tapes, these are pretty much the data storage upon which the world's data will be stored in. As such, it is also the area where data storage makers are putting much of their focus on.

Samsung's solution, in addition to the 3D-NAND it already uses, involves stacking layers of silicon to achieve more capacity without increasing the 2D area occupied by the memory. In other words, a vertical NAND, or V-NAND. But beyond that, Samsung's real achievement here is producing a 1 Tb (Terabit, not Terabyte) V-NAND chip.

This means that Samsung can produce a 2 TB (yes, Terabyte this time) NAND memory by stacking sixteen 1 Tb dies. More for mostly the same space as a regular NAND memory. And Samsung didn't stop at NAND chips either. It also revealed complete SSD solutions that can be more directly used in server racks. Its new 16 TB NGSFF (Next Generation Small Form Factor) SSD, for example, can be used instead of the common M.2 drives in 1U server racks to achieve greater data capacities at the same or better speeds. A single 1U rack can contain 36 such SSDs, totaling a whopping 576 TB. Samsung also has a new Z-SSD that has lower latencies than the fastest NVMe SSDs in the market.

While Samsung is more popular for its consumer electronics products, its silicon division has, ironically, been more profitable, showing steady growth quarter after quarter. And with the surging amount of data coming not just from smartphones but also from IoT devices, Samsung believes it has the solutions to store that flood of data.

SOURCE: Samsung