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Technology Stocks : WDC, NAND, NVM, enterprise storage systems, etc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SiliconAlley who wrote (3821)	6/11/2018 3:59:10 PM
From: storage_savant	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 4828

HDD still reigns supreme for read heavy enterprise workloads. QLC is the Edsel of NAND. The economics may look compelling on paper, but that is where it ends. It will flop in the enterprise, and later move in to consumer based products (promising "enterprise grade" technology). This response indicates a fundamental lack of understanding of enterprise use cases. You frame your responses from an authoritative position but clearly lack the knowledge needed to back up your arguments. HDD is very valuable in data centers, but only for archive and bulk storage. My argument is supported by the fact that demand for 10K HDD has fallen off a cliff while 7K HDD is growing. Random access times for a 10K HDD are an order of magnitude slower than NAND, and sequential performance is also lower. So anything that really needs minimum latency has transitioned to SSD. For the subset of those applications which are read heavy, QLC is compelling. I can speak with knowledge on this topic. I would suggest you google for X4, which is the technology created by M-Systems, later acquired by SanDisk. This technology is based on 3 bits per cell, with the "4th" bit of information encoded in geographic placement of the bits (in a cell and adjacent cells). Samsung, in litigation documents, admitted that this technology was worth billions. This technology is quietly at work in current WDC products. Further searches did not yield a document with sufficient technical depth to make a determination about this comment. However, I am generally skeptical that IP related to managing planar QLC NAND would have much relevance to 3D QLC. They are different beasts. I am open to changing my opinion if you can share something with more detail on the IP.