Flash storage (like SSDs) is all the rage for PCs these days. And though the process isn’t going as fast as we might hope for, that storage is getting cheaper and denser all the time, creeping up in value towards conventional spinning disk hard drives.
The biggest leap forward as of late has been 3D NAND flash, also known as vertical NAND or “V-NAND.” What does this mean for you? In layman’s terms, cheaper and faster storage and memory. In non-layman’s terms, well, let’s take a look.
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Building Up, Not Out
Imagine a piece of flash storage as an apartment building: lots of compartmentalized areas in which people need to get in or out, spending varying amounts of time either in (a “1” state for a single bit of data, in this metaphor) or out (“0” state) of their homes. Now, the most valuable resource you have if you’re building a new apartment building is the real estate you want to build it on. Ignoring mundane obstacles like engineering and budget, your goal is to put the maximum amount of people possible in a set area of land.
A hundred years ago, the obvious answer to this problem would be to subdivide apartments as small as possible on the inside of your building, maximizing the amount of people you can fit into a single story. Now with the advent of steel buildings and fast, safe elevators, we can build up to the limit of our new materials. We can add in as many stories to the building as we can physically manage, allowing ten, twenty, or fifty times as many people to live on the same amount of land that was previously so limited.
So it is with 2D and 3D NAND. Because we’re talking about bits and not people, companies have already worked hard to cram as…
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