Toshiba is busy at Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, but the big news is coming across as Toshiba has now launched their XL-Flash.
XL-Flash is an SLC part designed for very low latency. It is meant to combat Samsung's Z-NAND or even Intel 3D Xpoint which powers their OPTANE storage solutions.
XL-Flash is stated as you can see above to have a 5-microsecond delay which is 10x faster than existing TLC (50-microseconds). XL-Flash will be available to partners, which is a nice shift since Samsung's Z-NAND is locked to their models. We should see some very capable and speedy drives coming very soon.
Key Features
- 128 gigabit (Gb) die (in a 2-die, 4-die, 8-die package)
- 4KB page size for more efficient operating system reads and writes
- 16-plane architecture for more efficient parallelism
- Fast page read and program times. XL-FLASH provides a low read latency of less than 5 microseconds, approximately 10 times faster than existing TLC2