Micron Cancels Ballistix TX3 NVMe SSD

At Computex in June, Micron announced that Crucial’s Ballistix brand was being promoted to a standalone brand for gaming-oriented products. Their exhibit included three tiers of Ballistix DRAM products and one SSD: the Ballistix TX3 M.2 PCIe SSD. Based on Micron 3D MLC NAND and the Silicon Motion SM2260 NVMe SSD controller, the TX3 was to be Micron’s first consumer/retail SSD with 3D MLC or a PCIe interface and was slated for a release sometime in the second half of 2016.

Micron has informed us this week that the Ballistix TX3 program has been canceled. This leaves Micron’s consumer SSD strategy up in the air. With the release this summer of the Crucial MX300, Micron moved their mainstream SATA MX line from MLC to 3D TLC NAND, casting doubt on the future of the value-oriented BX series and implying that their 3D MLC might be regarded as premium enough to be reserved for PCIe SSD. With the Ballistix TX3 canceled, we no longer have any clear indication of how Micron plans to move forward with their consumer SSD products.

Micron may have decided to switch SSD controllers. While Silicon Motion reported last week at Flash Memory Summit that final firmware for the SM2260 controller is ready, Phison’s E7 controller is also available and ready to roll out, and Micron has been shipping Marvell’s 88SS1093 NVMe controller on their 7100 series enterprise SSDs in both U.2 and M.2 form factors, albeit with planar MLC NAND rather than their 3D NAND. Micron may also have decided that the timing was wrong to be getting into a market segment that Samsung has been handily dominating; beating Samsung’s PCIe M.2 drives on performance will be an uphill battle to say the least, and substantially undercutting them on price may not be possible while Micron is still ramping up production of their 3D MLC NAND.

Micron’s OEM and enterprise offerings may offer some clues to their plans, but the Micron and Crucial SSD product lines are no longer mere alter egos of each other. Micron’s 1100 series SATA SSD is the nearest equivalent to the MX300 with the same controller and same 3D TLC NAND, but the 1100 is more a little more conservative by retaining the traditional power of two drive capacities with generous overprovisioning while the MX300 dedicates some of the extra capacity of Micron’s 3D TLC chips to increasing the usable drive capacity.

Micron announced a 2100 series at the same time as the 1100 series, but did not provide full details as it was scheduled for a later introduction than the 1100, but still by the end of summer this year. The photos provided of the 2100 clearly showed the Silicon Motion SM2260 controller and the drive was stated to be using 3D NAND, but whether it would be MLC or TLC was not specified. The layout of the 2100 M.2 card was different than that of the Ballistix TX3 prototypes shown at Computex, but they still clearly had a few things in common. Micron’s website still lists the 2100 as “Coming Summer 2016”, and with regards to its fate Micron had this statement for us:

Micron is committed to delivering client PCIe NVMe solutions. While we are excited by the possibilities with our OEM partners, we are not disclosing availability details at this time. We will be sure to keep you updated as we are ready to share more.

We are eager to hear what Micron decides to do, as they are still only the second manufacturer to deliver 3D NAND for the client and consumer SSD market and we have not yet had the chance to test their 3D MLC NAND. Competition in the consumer PCIe SSD space will be heating up with or without Micron’s participation as more drives based on Phison, Marvell and Silicon Motion PCIe NVMe controllers hit the market over the next few months, but Micron’s entry was particularly promising for the inclusion of 3D NAND.

Intel Optane And 3D XPoint Updates From IDF

At Intel Developer Forum this week in San Francisco, Intel is sharing a few more details about its plans for their Optane SSDs using 3D XPoint memory.

The next milestone in 3D XPoint’s journey to being a real product will be a cloud-based testbed for Optane SSDs. Intel will be giving enterprise customers free remote access to systems equipped with Optane SSDs so that they can benchmark how their software runs with 3D Xpoint-based storage and optimize it to take better advantage of the faster storage. By offering cloud-based access before even sampling Optane SSDs, Intel can keep 3D XPoint out of the hands of their competitors longer and perhaps make better use of limited supply while still enabling the software ecosystem to begin preparing for the revolution Intel is planning. However, this won’t do much for customers who want to integrate and validate Optane SSDs with their existing hardware platforms and deployments.

The cloud-based Optane testbed will be available by the end of the year, suggesting that we might not be seeing any Optane SSDs in the wild this year. But at the same time, the testbed would only be worth providing if its performance characteristics are going to be pretty close to that of the final Optane SSD products. Having announced the Optane testbed like this, Intel will probably be encouraging their partners to share their performance findings with the public, so we should at least get some semi-independent testing results in a few months time.

In the meantime, Intel and ScaleMP will be demonstrating a use that Optane SSDs will be particularly well-suited for. ScaleMP’s vSMP Foundation software family provides virtualization solutions for high performance computing applications. One of their specialities is providing VMs with far more virtual memory than the host system has DRAM, by transparently using NVMe SSDs—or even the DRAM and NVMe storage of other systems connected via Infiniband—to cache what doesn’t fit in local DRAM. The latency advantages of 3D XPoint will make Optane SSDs far better swap devices than any flash-based SSDs, and the benefits should still be apparent even when some of that 3D XPoint memory is at the far end of an Infiniband link.

ScaleMP and Intel have previously demonstrated that flash-based NVMe SSDs can be used as a cost-effective alternative to building a server with extreme amounts of DRAM, and with a performance penalty that can be acceptably small. With Optane SSDs that performance penalty should be significantly smaller, widening the range of applications that can make use of this strategy.  

Intel will also be demonstrating Optane SSDs used to provide read caching for cloud application or database servers running on Open Compute hardware platforms.

Samsung at Flash Memory Summit: 64-layer V-NAND, Bigger SSDs, Z-SSD

At Flash Memory Summit, Samsung announced their fourth generation of 3D NAND and several of the more obvious SSD upgrades it enables. Taking a page from Intel and Micron’s strategy book, they also announced a new memory type and corresponding SSD product while saying essentially nothing about what the new memory actually is.

Gallery: Samsung 4th Generation V-NAND

The fourth generation 3D NAND bumps the layer count up to 64, compared to the 48-layer design used by the third generation V-NAND that was announced last fall and has been slowly rolling out to their SSD products over the course of this year. So far Samsung has talked about a 512Gb TLC part, and at least initially the MLC parts will probably be made from the same die and thus have two thirds the capacity. (Samsung’s second generation 3D NAND was initially available as 128Gb TLC or 86Gb MLC, with 128Gb MLC parts introduced later.) The new NAND also supports an increased interface speed of 800Mbps, which is key to reducing the performance penalty that comes from consolidating more flash onto fewer independent chips.

With a per-die capacity of 512Gb (64GB), Samsung can now put 1TB of TLC flash in a single package. This means most product lines will be seeing an increase in capacity at the high end of the range. Their BGA SSD products will be offering 1TB capacity even in the 11.5mm by 13mm form factor. The 16TB PM1633a SAS SSD will be eclipsed by the new 32TB PM1643. Likely to be further out, the PM1725 PCIe add-in card SSD will be succeeded by the PM1735 with a PCIe 4 x8 host interface.

Complementing the NAND update will be a new non-standard oversized M.2 form factor 32mm wide and 114mm long, compared to the typical enterprise M.2 size of 22mm by 110mm. A little extra room can go a long way, and Samsung will be using it to produce 8TB drives. These will be enterprise SSDs and Samsung showed a diagram of these enabling 256TB of flash in a 1U server. Samsung will also be producing 4TB drives in standard M.2 sizing.

Gallery: Samsung Z-NAND and Z-SSD

In what is likely a bid to steal some thunder from 3D XPoint memory before it can ship, Samsung announced Z-NAND memory technology and a Z-SSD product based around Z-NAND and a new SSD controller. They said nothing about the operating principles of Z-NAND, but they did talk about their plans for the Z-SSD products.

Samsung Z-SSD is being marketed as addressing the performance gap between DRAM and SSDs. Samsung’s slides during their keynote showed some performance comparisons against the PM963 NVMe TLC SSD and against an unnamed “PRAM based” solution. The logical point of comparison would be against 3D XPoint NVMe drives, but Samsung can’t have real performance and power numbers on those when they’re still under development by Intel and Micron. Thus the PRAM based solution Samsung refers to is probably one of their own earlier R&D efforts that didn’t make it to market. The Z-SSD ties or comes out ahead on every benchmark Samsung showed, but NVMe NAND flash SSDs were missing from the power consumption comparison.

The slides stated that there will be a 1TB Z-SSD this year and 2TB and 4TB Z-SSDs next year, while the press release issued later states that more generally that the Z-SSD is expected to be released next year. The press release also states that Z-NAND “shares the fundamental structure of V-NAND and has a unique circuit design and controller that can maximize performance”. Given that, the launch timeframe and capacities that are only a little lower than NAND flash SSDs, it seems that Z-NAND isn’t drastically different from existing memory technologies and it may even be little more than SLC flash in disguise, trying for a comeback.