Western Digital and Kioxia recently announced that they have released their latest 3D QLC NAND chips with a capacity of 2Tb, which will apparently be used to build M.2 SSD storage that will come with a capacity of 16TB later.
WD and Kioxia's latest 3D NAND QLC chips are built using a 218-layer BiCS8 process that allows these 2Tb or 256GB chips to be mass-produced. This latest chip is also reported to have a data transmission rate as fast as 3600MT/s and according to Kioxia, it is 70 percent more efficient than their previous 3D NAND chips in terms of electricity consumption for this fast data transmission.
According to Kioxia, the use of this 2Tb 3D NAND QLC chip is more focused on data center applications and supercomputers used to process artificial intelligence tasks and for now not for ordinary users.
For users who may want fast PCIe SSD storage, WD and Kioxia say they have also developed a 3D QLC 1Tb NAND chip that is more suitable for consumer-class products, in terms of storage options and also a more affordable price tag.