what workloads for QLC

SSD is good ?

As we know, in a bid to make solid state drives (SSDs) as capacious

as traditional hard drives, storage suppliers have looked to insert
ever more bits and bytes into NAND flash.

Quad-level cell (QLC) drives are the latest development of flash

storage technology. As the name suggests, the technology stores
four bits per cell.

The way QLC flash and all other NAND flash stores data is

essentially the same, using an electrical charge to determine whether
each cell is a “0” or a “1”. There are billions of such cells on a silicon
substrate and they can be used to store terabytes of information.

Originally, flash was designed to store a single bit in one cell. This
was known as SLC (single-level cell) technology. But soon it was
discovered that a cell could store more than one state by using a
range of voltages. This is how MLC (multiple-level cell) flash came
about, with each cell storing four states that recorded two bits of
binary information.

TLC (triple-level cell) extends this to eight states and can store three
bits of data per cell.

QLC can store four bits of data using 16 states, which means using
16 different voltage levels. This sounds great, but there are issues.
Penta-level cell (PLC) has now also appeared on the horizon,
but that’s another story.

QLC benefits and characteristics

The move to QLC as a storage medium should result in lower
total cost of ownership (TCO). Read-centric workloads rely on
vast arrays of HDDs to deliver results; QLC drives can
achieve this with fewer drives and therefore lower cost.

This is because QLC stores one-third more bits per cell than

its TLC predecessor, increasing storage density by up to
nearly eight times as much as traditional HDDs. This should
result in saving space within a datacentre.

QLC: More density, more challenges

Although increasing the capacity of cells has advantages in
terms of increasing the amount of data that can be stored,
there are a number of drawbacks.

Every time a cell is written to, it gets a little bit damaged

– which means each cell has a finite lifetime. This is
called endurance and is measured by the number of times
a program/erase (P/E) cycle can be carried out on the flash
memory.

NAND is programmed and erased by applying a voltage that

sends electrons through an insulator. The location of those
electrons (and their quantity) determine when current will
flow between a source and a sink (called a voltage
threshold), and that determines the data stored in that cell
(the 1s and 0s). When writing and erasing NAND, it sends the
electrons through the insulator and back, and that causes the
insulator to wear. The exact number of these cycles in each
individual cell varies by NAND design.
For SLC flash, P/E cycles are typically about 100,000. This
drops to 35,000-10,000 for MLC, and 5,000 for TLC, although
improvements in these figures are continuously being made by
suppliers.

When it comes to QLC, P/E cycles were originally expected to

be around 100, but manufacturers have managed to increase
this to 1,000 P/E cycles.

When more data is stored in a cell, a single bit change

entails rewriting the whole cell. This is because before you
can change the cell, you need to know what value it already
has.

The increased density that results from having 16 different

voltage levels makes it increasingly difficult to tell the
bits apart. So while QLC is 25% denser than TLC, it is also
significantly slower. QLC read speeds are not too different
from other types of flash, but sustained write speeds top out
at 160MBps, which is slower than a traditional hard drive.

Cache the flash

If QLC is slower and breaks down more quickly than other
flash, why bother at all?

To hide this problem, suppliers use caching techniques on

QLC. Part of the drive is used as an SLC cache to improve
write speeds. This cache can be written to at the speeds
found in high-end SSDs with the drive controller flushing out
data from the SLC cells to QLC cells. However, once this
cache is full, there is a drop-off in speed as the QLC cells
are directly written to.

QLC use cases

Although the write performance and durability of QLC is not
that great compared with other flash technologies, it should
not be ruled out for use in the enterprise. In fact, QLC
flash offers similar read performance and endurance to TLC
flash storage.

The greater wear and tear caused by having more bits packed
into one cell means QLC is not best suited to write-heavy
workloads. Fewer write operations makes for a longer-lasting
disk.

THANK you!