Toshiba and Western Digital's rather shaky joint venture in Japan has finished up development of a 1.33 terabit QLC NAND chip, which could prove very useful to gamers. WD is prepping consumer-facing SanDisk drives fitted with the latest storage tech for volume production before the end of the year.
As storage requirements have skyrocketed over the past few decades so, too, has the need for super speedy memory tech that can keep up with modern computing power. Unfortunately, this tech can be hugely expensive per-GB compared to high-capacity platter drives, so most of us gamers have been fairly lackadaisical with investing heavily in SSD storage for anything other than our chosen OS and a couple of select games.
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But that’s not going to be the case forever, and QLC is one step towards making NAND flash somewhat affordable thanks to all the bits it can store in one cell. Toshiba and WD’s latest QLC 3D NAND chip fits 1.33 terabits of data onto a single 96-layer chip. It’s also already sampling and will be available in consumer drives under the SanDisk badge (which WD now owns, hence the awkward joint venture) before the end of the year.
There is a downside, however. QLC isn’t the most durable storage tech in the world. As such, endurance will be lower than SLC, MLC, and TLC designs on the market already. Performance will also suffer in the name of high density and lower cost per-GB.
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