The former King being Optane, while the New King is the resurrection of garden variety SSD, albeit supplied with SLC NAND. Do any gentle Readers recall SLC SSD?? I do, but never could afford such. Best I could do was early consumer-grade MLC Intel drives. They're still running, as well as my MLC Crucial (Micron) main drive. Knock on wood.
News of new SLC drives aimed at the Optane TAM.
We saw Micron introducing their XTR NVMe SSDs earlier this year using their 176L 3D NAND in SLC mode. The company had optimized the firmware on the drives and drawn up specifications for near-Optane performance in Microsoft SQL Server analytics workloads. Solidigm is taking a similar approach with the D7-P5810, albeit with optimizations for a different use-case.It appears that the return to SLC is mostly about endurance, as might be expected. That is: is the claimed endurance benefit just because the Xnm current node is SLC or that these drives are also built on beefier XXnm nodes? Only The Shadow knows; the article doesn't address the question of node size. But I'd be willing to bet a large sum that none of the foundries has invested in the ability run their multi-hundred layer lines at multiple node sizes. Is this 20nm+ nodes? Don't know, but it's still standard NAND, so not a platform for Single Level Storage as Optane might have been. Sigh.
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