Silicon has been with us for many decades but will need a replacement. For NAND storage, it has become increasingly difficult to progress by shrinking the process. The chief way to combat this is to resort to 3D NAND instead of planar NAND, allowing for use of older process nodes. With the release of their latest design, SK Hynix has become the second producer of 3D NAND after Samsung.
The SK Hynix PE3110 uses the latest 3D NAND V2, their second generation product. The NAND reportedly stacks 36 layers together to make a single die. Combined with the M.2 form factor and NVMe protocol, it makes for a potent enterprise SSD. The drive uses the proprietary 8-channel Pegasus PCIe 3.0 x4 controller to service the 960GB SSD. This allows for speeds like 1,700 / 750MB/s sequential and 160,000 / 30,000 IOPS for read and writes respectively.
With SK Hynix producing their own drives with 3D NAND, it’s only a matter of time until they hit consumer and third-party drives as well. Micron, Intel, SanDisk and Toshiba are also working on their own 3D NAND so 2016 looks to be the year of 3D NAND. Due to the use of older process nodes and the 3D architecture, we may see a revitalization of the SSD industry which has stagnated somewhat in terms of pure NAND performance.
