Kiss My Avatar

"Avatar" was the first 3D movie I recall seeing. I know I'd seen at least one of the 'spears thrown at your face' farces from kidhood, but no memory. "Avatar", on the other hand, was revelatory, if only because it displayed in polarized 3D as opposed to red/green silliness.

For some time, there's been talk of 3D NAND in SSDs. Well, here 'tis. Courtesy of Samsung, naturally. Now, they've got a repurpose for all that big node fab. Neat.

By stacking transistors (i.e. cells when speaking about NAND) vertically, Samsung is able to relax the process node back to a much more convenient 40nm. When there are 32 cells on top of each other, it is obvious that there is no need for a 10nm-class node because the stacking increases the density, allowing production costs to scale lower. As we have seen with the history of NAND die shrinks, a higher process node provides more endurance and higher performance, which is what the 850 Pro and V-NAND is all about.

Holy Smokes!!!!

... I was told that the warranty is not automatically denied if 150TB is reached under a client workload. In fact, Samsung said that they have a 128GB 850 Pro in their internal testing with over eight petabytes (that is 8,000TB) of writes and the drive still keeps going, so I tip my hat to the person who is able to wear out an 850 Pro in a client environment during my lifetime.

I wonder what this does to "Enterprise SSD" outfits like Violin Memory? Nothing good, I expect.