Solid-state drives (SSDs) offering massive storage space of 6TB, 8TB, or even 100TB may soon become a thing of the past, after SanDisk starts delivering its recently revealed petabyte (1PB) products, although the company is yet to provide any specific release dates.
Indeed, last week’s SanDisk Investor Day saw the demonstration of the company’s updated roadmap, which showed the development and launch of a 1PB eSSD drive platform with a goal to meet the rising AI-driven capacity requirements, per a report on February 17.
According to the images from the presentation, the company’s 1PB UltraQLC-based SSD platform is the next natural step from the 128TB SSDs, which the company expects to roll out in 2025, the 256TB product it plans for the next year, and the 512TB SSDs, which are set to come out in 2027.
What SanDisk’s petabyte SSDs bring
As it happens, the evolution to the 1PB product, which the company expects sometime after 2027, will involve combining SanDisk’s BiCS8 QLC 3D NAND technology, the super-advanced custom-designed controller with an impressive 64 NAND channel, and firmware.
Notably, the proprietary controller incorporates domain-specific hardware accelerators offloading critical storage functions from firmware. This way, it reduces latency, enables more bandwidth, and improves reliability for hyperscale storage needs.
Additionally, the controller scales power dynamically based on workload needs, ensuring peak energy efficiency, and features a sophisticated bus multiplexer that manages increased data load from high-density 3D QLC NAND memory stacks, facilitating total channel utilization without reducing performance.
Commenting on the technology, Khurram Ismail, the Chief of Engineering and Product Management at SanDisk, explained:
“UltraQLC [is] custom built based on our decades of experience and our current learnings to really be deployed in the modern data infrastructure while not compromising on density, performance, and power efficiency. (…) It is really built around those three things: (…) BICS 8 NAND technology [and future NAND too], customized controllers, and advanced system design.”
Meanwhile, advances in AI technology have pushed the need for greater memory capacity beyond what the industry is currently offering, leading to innovations such as Samsung’s 24GB GDDR7 DRAM, the first of its kind, which the company expects to hit the shelves sometime this year.
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