STEC’s MLC enterprise SSD

I haven’t seen much of a specification on STEC’s new enterprise MLC SSD but it should be interesting.  So far everything I have seen seems to indicate that it’s a pure MLC drive with no SLC  NAND.  This is difficult for me to believe but could easily be cleared up by STEC or their specifications.  Most likely it’s a hybrid SLC-MLC drive similar, at least from the NAND technology perspective, to FusionIO’s SSD drive.

MLC write endurance issue

My difficulty with a pure MLC enterprise drive is the write endurance factor.  MLC NAND can only endure around 10,000 erase/program passes before it starts losing data.  With a hybrid SLC-MLC design one could have the heavy write data go to SLC NAND which has a 100,000 erase/program pass lifecycle and have the less heavy write data go to MLC.  Sort of like a storage subsystem “fast write” which writes to cache first and then destages to disk but in this case the destage may never happen if the data is written often enough.

The only flaw in this argument is that as the SSD drives get bigger (STEC’s drive is available supporting up to 800GB) this becomes less of an issue. Because with more raw storage the fact that a small portion of the data is very actively written gets swamped by the fact that there is plenty of storage to hold this data.  As such, when one NAND cell gets close to its lifetime another, younger cell can be used.  This process is called wear leveling. STEC’s current SLC Zeus drive already has sophisticated wear leveling to deal with this sort of problem with SLC SSDs and doing this for MLCs just means having larger tables to work with.

I guess at some point, with multi-TB per drives, the fact that MLC cannot sustain more than 10,000 erase/write passes becomes moot.  Because there just isn’t that much actively written data out there in an enterprise shop. When you amortize the portion of highly written data as a percentage of a drive, the more drive capacity, the smaller the active data percentages become. As such, as SSD drive capacities gets larger this becomes less of an issue.  I figure with 800GB drives, active data proportion might still be high enough to cause a problem but it might not be an issue at all.

Of course with MLC it’s also cheaper to over provision NAND storage to also help with write endurance. For an 800GB MLC SSD, you could easily add another 160GB (20% over provisioning) fairly cheaply. As such, over provisioning will also allow you to sustain an overall drive write endurance that is much higher than the individual NAND write endurance.

Another solution to the write endurance problem is to increase the power of ECC to handle write failures. This would probably take some additional engineering and may or may not be in the latest STEC MLC drive but it would make sense.

MLC performance

The other issue about MLC NAND is that it has slower read and erase/program cycle times.  Now these are still order’s of magnitude faster than standard disk but slower than SLC NAND.  For enterprise applications SLC SSDs are blistering fast and are often performance limited by the subsystem they are attached to. So, the fact that MLC SSDs are somewhat slower than SLC SSDs may not even be percieved by enterprise shops.

MLC performance is slower because it takes longer to read a cell with multiple bits in it than it takes with just one. MLC, in one technology I am aware of, encodes 2-bits in the voltage that is programmed in or read out from a cell, e.g., VoltageA = “00”, VoltageB=”01″, VoltageC=”10″, and VoltageD=”11″. This gets more complex with 3 or more bits per cell but the logic holds.  With multiple voltages, determining which voltage level is present is more complex for MLC and hence, takes longer to perform.

In the end I would expect STEC’s latest drive to be some sort of SLC-MLC hybrid but I could be wrong. It’s certainly possible that STEC have gone with just an MLC drive and beefed up the capacity, over provisioning, ECC, and wear leveling algorithms to handle its lack of write endurance

MLC takes over the world

But the major issue with using MLC in SSDs is that MLC technology is driving the NAND market. All those items in the photo above are most probably using MLC NAND, if not today then certainly tomorrow. As such, the consumer market will be driving MLC NAND manufacturing volumes way above anything the SLC market requires. Such volumes will ultimately make it unaffordable to manufacture/use any other type of NAND, namely SLC in most applications, including SSDs.

So sooner or later all SSDs will be using only MLC NAND technology. I guess the sooner we all learn to live with that the better for all of us.