"It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so." -  Mark Twain

I try and keep this quote in my mind whenever I’m teaching about new technologies. You often hear the same things parroted over and over again long after they quit being true. This problem is compounded by fast moving technologies like NAND Flash.

If you have read my previous posts about Flash memory you are already aware of NAND flash endurance and reliability. Just like CPU’s manufacturing processes flash receive boost in capacity as you decrease the size of the transistors/gates used on the device. In CPU’s you get increases in speed, on flash you get increases in size. The current generation of flash manufactured on a 32nm process. This nets four gigabytes per die. Die size isn’t the same as chip, or package size. Flash dies are actually stacked in the actual chip package giving us sixteen gigabytes per package. With the new die shrink to 25nm we double the size to eight gigabytes and thirty two gigabytes respectively. That sounds great, but there is a dark side to the ever shrinking die. As the size of the gate gets smaller it becomes more unreliable and has less endurance than the previous generation. MLC flash suffers the brunt of this but SLC isn’t completely immune.

Cycles And Errors

One of the things that always comes up when talking about flash is the fact it wears out over time. The numbers that always get bantered about are SLC is good for 100,000 writes to a single cell and MLC dies at 10,000 cycles. This is one of those things that just ain’t so any more. Right now the current MLC main stream flash based on the 32nm process write cycles are down to 5000 or so. 25nm cuts that even further to 3000 with higher error rates to boot.

Several manufactures has announced the transition to 25nm on their desktop drives. Intel and OCZ being two of the biggest. Intel is a partner with Micron. They are directly responsible for developing and manufacturing quite a bit of the NAND flash on the market. OCZ is a very large consumer of that product. So, what do you do to offset the issues with 25nm? Well, the same thing you did to offset that problem with 32nm, more spare area and more ECC. At 32nm it wasn’t unusual to see 24 bits of ECC per 512 bytes. Now, I’ve seen numbers as high as 55 bits per 512 bytes to give 25nm the same protection.

To give you an example here is OCZ’s lineup with raw and usable space listed.

As you can clearly see the usable space is significantly decreased. There is a second problem specific to the OCZ drives as well. Since they are now using higher density modules they are only using half as many of them. Since most SSD’s get their performance from multiple read/write channels cutting that in half isn’t a good thing.

SLC is less susceptible to this issue but it is happening. At 32nm SLC was still in the 80,000 to 100,000 range for write cycles but the error rate was getting higher. At 25nm that trend continues and we are starting to see some of the same techniques used in MLC coming to SLC as ECC creeps up from 1 bit per 512 bytes to 8 bits or more per 512 bytes. Of course the down side to SLC is it is half the capacity of MLC. As die shrinks get smaller SLC may be the only viable option in the enterprise space.

It’s Non-Volatile… Mostly

Another side effect of shrinking the floating gate size is the loss of charge due to voltage bleed off over time. When I say “over time” I’m talking weeks or months and not years or decades anymore. The data on these smaller and smaller chips will have to be refreshed every few weeks. We aren’t seeing this severe an issue at the 25nm level but it will be coming unless they figure out a way to change the floating gate to prevent it.

Smaller Faster Cheaper

If you look at trends in memory and CPU you see that every generation the die gets smaller, capacity or speed increases and they become cheaper as you can fit double the chips on a single wafer. There are always technical issues to overcome with every technology. But NAND flash is the only one that gets so inherently so unreliable at smaller and smaller die sizes. So, does this mean the end of flash? In the short term I don’t think so. The fact is we will have to come up with new ways to reduce writes and add new kinds of protection and more advanced ECC. On the pricing front we are still in a position where demand is outstripping supply. That may change somewhat as 25nm manufacturing ramps up and more factories come online but as of today, I wouldn’t expect a huge drop in price for flash in the near future. If it was just a case of SSD’s consuming the supply of flash it would be a different matter. The fact is your cell phone, tablet and every other small portable device uses the exact same flash chips. Guess who is shipping more, SSDs or iPhones?

So, What Do I Do?

The easiest thing you can do is read the label. Check what manufacturing process the SSD is using. In some cases like OCZ that wasn’t a straight forward proposition. In most cases though the manufacturer prints raw and formatted capacities on the label. Check the life cycle/warranty of the drive. Is it rated for 50 gigabytes of writes or 5 terabytes of writes a day? Does it have a year warranty or 5 years? These are indicators of how long the manufacturer expects the drive to last. Check the error rate! Usually the error rate will be expressed in unrecoverable write or read errors per bit. Modern hard drives are in the 10^15 ~ 10^17 range. Some enterprise SSDs are in the 10^30 range. This tells me they are doing more ECC than the flash manufacturer “recommends” to keep your data as safe as possible.