Micron manufacturing SSDs over 15 terabytes with new 176-layer NAND

Memory specialist Micron is taking flash chip stacking technology to a new level: The company is currently producing the first samples of 3D NAND components in which 176 layers of memory chips are stacked on top of each other. The new memory chips will be delivered to customers as test samples in the form of the new Micron 7450 SSD.

The products are primarily aimed at data center operators. According to Micron, they should be able to achieve significant performance benefits from using the products. This is ensured, among other things, by a latency of fewer than two milliseconds for 99.9999 percent of the accesses. Particularly when working with common database systems such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, RocksDB, Cassandra, and Aerospike, considerable speed advantages are achieved. Compared to a conventional SATA SSD, latency would be reduced by 50 percent, and read bandwidth increased by a factor of 12.

AMD collaboration

The 7450 SSD is available in storage capacities from 400 gigabytes to 15.36 terabytes. It is offered in the E1.S form factor, among others, which is now used in most servers in the major cloud data centers. Micron expects it will soon receive significant orders for larger quantities as many customers are currently being supplied with the samples — including Facebook mom Meta.

In the development of the new memory systems, Micron is also collaborating with AMD, among others. This is to ensure that the interaction with the latest Epyc processors for servers runs particularly well. Datacenter operators can now test exactly what this looks like in practice. It will probably take several months before the new memory chips will also be available in the first products for the private customer market.