First it was Samsung with its 15.36 terabytes. Then Seagate appeared with a 60 TB unit. And now Toshiba comes out of nowhere anticipating an SSD... of 100 terabytes? The Flash Memory Summit left the solid-state world buzzing, and although it is still a concept, Toshiba indicated through a special presentation that its new QLC technology—capable of storing four bits per cell—could lead to products with 100 terabytes of capacity and a sequential read speed of 3 gigabytes per second over PCI Express.
The Race Heats Up
It seems we are at the beginning of a new arms race, and a good one. The published costs might be prohibitive for the average user right now, but if the pace holds, we'll see a clear technological shift that will benefit the general market in the short term. Many solid-state drives are already available for less than 60 euros, work perfectly alongside traditional hard drives, and the latest operating systems enable all necessary features (TRIM being a good example). However, some market giants like Samsung and Seagate have started breaking records, first with a 15.36 terabyte unit (available for $10,000) and then with a 60 terabyte prototype. Now, a third player enters the game: Toshiba.
The QLC Promise
Let's start by saying that Toshiba received good news. After a long restructuring process (resulting from that famous accounting scandal in 2015), it returned to profitability after six fiscal quarters in the red. It might be too early to suggest that Toshiba is back, but at the Flash Memory Summit it dropped a bomb: 100-terabyte solid-state drives. In essence, an SSD with such capacity would be possible by combining three-dimensional manufacturing methods and its new QLC technology, which can store four bits per cell. Logically, increasing the number of bits reduces speed and durability of flash memory, but Toshiba proposes adopting the PCI Express 3.0 interface, reaching 3 GB/s in reading and 1 GB/s in writing (both sequential).
As for endurance, Toshiba indicated a workload of "between 3 and 6 petabytes", with a write endurance of 900 TB, or nine complete write cycles. Some potential clients, such as Facebook, expect QLC technology to reach 150 cycles, although in those environments the WORM (write-once-read-many) concept is also very useful for "cold data" that is modified very rarely. How long would it take Toshiba to create such an SSD? Sources talk about six months.
