Tag: Wear

Examining 3D XPoint’s 1,000 Times Endurance Benefit

3D XPoint Endurance GraphicThe Memory Guy, as a regular reader of The SSD Guy’s posts, found an interesting one that compares the endurance of Optane SSDs against that of NAND flash SSDs.  Perhaps this could provide some insight into the Intel & Micron claim that 3D XPoint Memory’s endurance is 1,000 times that of standard NAND flash, shown in the graphic to the left.

The SSD Guy post converts several different measures of SSD endurance against each other: TBW, DWPD, and GB/Day.  Definitions of these terms can be found in that post.

It occurred to me that any of these can be used to roughly gauge the relative endurance of 3D XPoint Memory against that of NAND flash.

Take DWPD for example: Drive Writes per Day.  Not only is this a measure of how many times that an SSD can be over-written every day, but it’s also an indication of the number of times that each memory cell can be overwritten.  If you know this, and if you know how long Continue reading “Examining 3D XPoint’s 1,000 Times Endurance Benefit”

Macronix Solves Flash Wear Problem

Macronix Headquarters, Hsinchu TaiwanThe December issue of the IEEE Spectrum includes a fascinating article about a 100 million cycle flash memory developed by Macronix.  The company will present this design at at IEDM this month.

In brief: Macronix’ researchers buried a heater in the array to heat the tunnel dielectric, annealing out the disruptions & traps that might cause a bit to fail.

A prototype has so far been tested more than 100 million cycles and it shows no sign of impending failure.  Researchers believe that it is likely to reach one billion or more cycles, but such testing will take several months.  This just may be able to Continue reading “Macronix Solves Flash Wear Problem”