HyperLink SSD Technology to Enable 8TB SSDs and Impressive Perfromance

SSDs need quite a big number of channels to reach big capacities such as 512GB or 1TB. Ottawa-headquartered Mosaid Technologies has just announced the first HyperLink SSD technology implementation that allows an SSDs to reach 2TB of storage capacity, all controlled by a single controller.

This is, indeed, a great achievement, as most SSDs on the market right now need no less than five SSD controllers to enable a drive to achieve 2TB of storage capacity.

Today’s technology needs four different SSD controllers and a controller HUB to enable an SSD drive that can store 2TB of data.

Mosaid’s HyperLink technology achieves this using a single SATA3 SSD controller.

The explanation behind this achievement is the fact that Mosaid’s new SSD controller and the SSD drive itself use the company’s HyperLink NAND technology.

HLNAND is, in fact, a 16-die NAND stack that operates on a single channel.

The company is now sampling the industry’s first 512Gb NAND Flash MCP chip that contains 16 different 32GB NAND Flahs dies and that has two HLNAND links.

The need for two HLNAND links arises from the fact that Mosaid’s controller is a 40nm FPGA chip, and the reality is that the transfer rates achieved initially were quite modest.

Initial single-channel HLNAND performance was set at 120 MB/s read and 74 MB/s write.

Getting this performance up required either more links or a faster controller frequency.

The company has managed to improve it once they started sampling the 512 Gb chips, as these reach a 333 MB/s output on a single byte-wide HLNAND interface channel.

A 512GB SSD with 8 such chips would theoretically reach a 2.6GB/s transfer rate.

There is a balance between capacity and performance that must be maintained if the technology is to attain its main two goals: enabling huge capacities and doing it at a lower cost than current SSD technologies.

Mosaid is an IP company founded in 1974. They license the technologies they’re developing, so don’t expect SSDs manufactured by them to reach the retail channel.




Via: HyperLink SSD Technology to Enable 8TB SSDs and Impressive Perfromance