SSDs based on the 3D V-NAND technology should show up sooner or later

May 9, 2014 08:22 GMT  ·  By

Samsung released the first solid-state drive based on its 3D V-NAND technology back in August 2013, but maybe we'll be seeing some more drives like that soon. Perhaps even aimed at the consumer market.

After all, now that Samsung has finally begun mass production at the new Xi’an plant in China, it should have a bigger supply of 3D Vertical NAND Flash memory chips.

And a greater supply means that instead of all the chips going to established product lines, there are some that can be used for new things.

3D V-NAND has multiple layers of NAND cells one on top of the other, and should scale the better the manufacturing process becomes.

Samsung expects to launch single NAND chips with a capacity of 1 Tb by 2017. 1 Tb is the same as 128 GB, which is a lot.

Currently, V-NAND is made on the 30nm process (stacking makes reducing the die size unnecessary). And older manufacturing processes have better endurance, which is another plus.

Add to that a higher performance and you have improvements all across the board. No wonder that Samsung made sure to finish the new manufacturing plant as fast as possible (it took 20 months to complete it).