Toshiba storage products based on ‘3D’ Flash memory put through paces

Why it matters to you

Always looking for more storage? Toshiba’s latest Flash storage technology is capable of cramming 64GB of data on a single chip.

While Microsoft flashed new technologies and announcements during its Build 2017 developer conference in Seattle, Dell had a conference of its own this week in Las Vegas — Dell EMC World 2017. It was during this event that Toshiba demonstrated its latest Flash storage technology, which is capable of cramming 64GB of data on a single chip.

More specifically, Toshiba demonstrated its third-generation BiCS Flash memory technology made up of 64 layers. As a reference, traditional “2D” Flash NAND memory used in SSDs, USB drives, and the like increase storage capacity by expanding cells horizontally like a city block. Eventually, the capacity of a storage device is bound by physical limits.

Toshiba’s “3D” Flash-based memory builds vertically, like a skyscraper, providing 64 “floors” of office-like storage cells. In turn, each cell can store three bits of data, thus a single chip can hold 512 gigabits (Gb) of information, which translates into 64 gigabytes (GB). Throw multiple chips into an SSD, and that drive has a crazy-high storage capacity.

“The future of SSDs is 3D,” said Greg Wong, founder and principal analyst of Forward Insights. “3D flash memory is enabling the production of higher-capacity and more cost-effective SSDs to better meet a variety of requirements across the consumer and enterprise spaces.”

Stacked flash memory isn’t anything new, but it’s becoming more mainstream. Flash-based memory makers typically slap special names on their 3D NAND technology, such as Intel’s 3D XPoint brand, Samsung’s V-NAND brand, and Toshiba’s BiCS brand, which is short for Bit Cost Scaling.

Ultimately, all three achieve the same purpose of scaling storage capacity vertically while using slightly different techniques. Toshiba promises high speed due to the way data is shoved into each storage cell. It also promises high reliability based on how each cell is spread apart to prevent interference from neighboring cells.

Another benefit of BiCS is power reduction. Because the storage cells support an extremely fast “single-shot” programming sequence, the overall storage chip consumes less power. Standard hard drives also consume more power because they include spinning magnetic storage discs and disc readers to read and write data. Flash storage has no moving parts.

The 64-layer BiCS Flash chip demonstrated during Dell’s convention resided in a new Toshiba XG Series SSD. This was the drive’s first public showing, and will serve as a launch pad for Toshiba’s third-generation BiCS Flash technology.  The drive connected to its host laptop via an internal NVMe PCI Express interface packing around 1TB of storage using 64GB and 32GB chips.

“The new XG Series SSD is an ideal platform to launch the 64-layer flash memory, due to the product’s broad adoption, maturity, and robustness, honed over multiple generations of PCIe/NVMe client SSD product releases,” the company said.

Toshiba plans to move all client, data center, and enterprise SSD to the new 64-layer BiCS Flash memory once the XG Series SSDs hit the market. For now, Toshiba is sampling the 64GB BiCS Flash chip to original equipment manufacturers.