In a recent webcast, Western Digital offered a glimpse at the future of solid state storage. Its latest QLC flash memory promises unparalleled density and more. Thus, the door is beginning to open for much more efficient and higher-capacity SSDs.
This memory isn’t ready to power the best SSDs of the future, but there’s still plenty to get excited about. Western Digital uses a 218-layer BiCS8 node to make its new 2Tb 3D QLC NAND die. This design promises more storage in the same fingerprint-sized footprint.
For those unfamiliar with storage measurement units, 2Tb (terabits) is equal to 256GB (gigabytes). Put four of these dies together and you have 1TB of storage and so on. This is a massive improvement over Western Digital’s previous die, which only offered half that capacity. Though, to be fair, we’re comparing QLC to TLC in this case. As such, stalwarts solid-state 4TB drives like the company’s WD_Black SN850X could end up feeling comparatively thin.
The brand claims that its PiCS8 design is best-in-class offering between 15% and 19% higher density than nearest tested competition. Same for I/O speed where Western Digital claims to be 50% faster than its peers of the same generation. Lastly, WD claims the design uses 13% less power to program per GB.
We can expect two variants of this die to emerge from Western Digital. A performance oriented option, with focusses on bandwidth in addition to a capacity-leaning version prioritising endurance. The company hasn’t disclosed much information on expected real-world performance. However, it plans to release full specifications in the near future.
You can watch the webcast for yourself here (thanks Tom’s Hardware), but you’ll need to provide some credentials.
If you’re after a super spacious and speedy SSD right now, give our MSI Spatium M580 Frozr review a read.