Taking Flash Memory Global

The history of technology is full of inspired ideas that never took off. Some products never make it to commercialization. Others occupy a small niche, or fail to gain traction and slowly fade out of the market.

Pursuing even the most promising innovation is a challenge. Getting that innovation into a market-leading position is an even bigger challenge. That was the task facing Samsung when the company decided to follow a vision to develop its own NAND flash memory and solid-state drive (SSDs) technology.

Source: Samsung

The challenge was not just to develop the broadest possible range of market applications for SSD technology, but to innovate continuously to meet ever-increasing demand for capacity, speed, reliability and security.

When Samsung commercialized their first SSD in 2006, the technology was mainly used for server and enterprise applications. Since then, the company has continuously expanded the use for SSDs in the enterprise server market by taking advantage of its fast data-access speeds and energy efficiency. To propel the market to the next level, Samsung needed SSDs to transition into everyday consumer devices.

In 2010, Samsung launched its 470 series of SATA consumer SSDs, followed in 2011 by the 830 series. The 830 sold 10,000 units within two months, confirming Samsung’s belief in the consumer appeal of SSDs.

That was the cue Samsung needed to arrive at a decisive inflection point. In 2011, Samsung sold its hard disk drive (HDD) business to the U.S.-based Seagate Technology, committing the company’s time and resources to the future of consumer SSDs. The goal was to develop the widest possible variety of SSD products catering to the broadening consumer market for storage solutions. There was a major obstacle standing in the way of this goal, however, and that was the basic architecture of the memory cell.

Source: Samsung

To understand why this was a problem, it helps to imagine a storage device as a town. Each memory cell in that device is a house, and the data inside each cell are its residents. At first, there is plenty of space in the neighborhoods of this town, and the residents of the houses get along smoothly. As the town develops, however, the population increases, more houses are built and the space between the houses gets smaller and smaller. The residents (or data) get squashed into smaller and tighter spaces, and noise and interference starts to become a problem.

Samsung solved this basic issue in the same way the cities of the world responded to growing populations – by building upwards. Replacing 2D linear “houses” with three-dimensional vertical “skyscrapers” (3D V-NAND) enabled Samsung to overcome two of the biggest obstacles to the growth of the consumer SSD market: capacity and price. V-NAND SSDs ushered in a new era of ultra-high-capacity, low-cost storage devices.

The company’s official introduction of 24-layer V-NAND in 2013 was the first in a series of breakthroughs paving the way for terabyte-class SSDs, leading eventually to the most recent sixth-generation 1xx-layer V-NAND in 2019.

For consumers, the advantages of upgrading from noisy and power-hungry HDDs to SSDs were immediately obvious. Everything from basic functions such as booting up and transferring files, to high-performance tasks like gaming and editing high-definition video was suddenly a faster and more comfortable experience.

Source: Samsung

Samsung’s foresight in pursuing SSD development also paid off with the advent of the notebook era. Today, laptop use has become almost universal.

“Not only are most laptops now equipped with SSDs, but as the amount of data we create continues to increase, demand for speedy and portable storage devices is also growing,” says Samsung. “Samsung’s lineup of portable SSDs was created specifically to meet this demand, offering external storage solutions that are faster and lighter than traditional HDDs while ensuring high data reliability."

In January 2015, Samsung debuted the T1, its premium 3D V-NAND-applied portable SSD. Smaller than a business card and weighing roughly 30 grams, the T1 slipped easily into a pocket or bag and set the consumer standard for capacity and convenience.

The T1 was followed by the T3 in 2016 and the T5 in 2017. The following year, the company officially introduced its X series of portable drives with PCle-based NVMe interface and Thunderbolt™ 3 support, breaking yet another frontier by achieving new heights of performance.

To get an idea of the scale of that step forward, if the bandwidth of SATA – the standard interface for data transfer – is a single-lane road, then PCle is a six-lane highway. Once again, Samsung was the first to apply the PCle-based NVMe interface to enterprise and consumer devices, cementing its leadership in the SSD market.

Samsung’s most recent release is the T7 Touch, an exceptionally fast portable SSD that combines high performance with the built-in fingerprint sensor security that consumers have come to know from flagship smartphones.

“Commercializing your own R&D is difficult, getting your innovations to the top of the market is even more difficult, and keeping them at the top is the hardest of all,” says Samsung. “But by repeatedly ushering in new eras of high-performance SSDs for enterprise and consumers, Samsung is blazing the trail for the future of flash memory technology.”