Recently, two storage manufacturers, Samsung and Kioxia, have released the latest news. Firstly, Samsung announced the start of mass production of the 9th generation V-NAND chip. This chip adopts the next-generation NAND flash interface "Toggle 5.1", which can improve data input/output speed by 33% to reach 3.2Gbps. In addition, Samsung plans to consolidate its position in the high-performance SSD market by expanding support for PCIe 5.0. The 9th generation V-NAND has the smallest unit size and thinnest module in the industry, increasing its bit density by about 50% compared to the 8th generation V-NAND. Moreover, through low-power design improvements, the 9th generation V-NAND also reduces power consumption by 10%. SungHoi Hur, the head of Samsung's storage business products and technology, expressed that with the latest V-NAND technology, Samsung will continue to lead the trend in the high-performance and high-density SSD market to meet the demands of next-generation artificial intelligence. It is reported that Samsung plans to start mass production of quad-level cell (QLC) models later this year.

On the other hand, Kioxia announced the release of the new generation UFS 4.0 flash memory chip, offering capacities of 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB. This new flash memory chip incorporates Kioxia's BiCS Flash 3D memory and controller chip, integrated with MIPI M-PHY 5.0 and UniPro 2.0 interface standards. It supports a theoretical interface speed of 23.2 Gbps per channel or 46.4 Gbps per device and is backward compatible with UFS 3.1. Compared to the previous generation UFS 4.0 products, this new chip offers a 15% improvement in sequential write speed, a 50% improvement in random write speed, a 30% improvement in random read speed, while maintaining a sequential read speed of up to 4640MB/s. The new product adopts the JEDEC standard 9mm x 13mm package, which is 18% smaller than the previous 11mm x 13mm package. The flash memory package thickness is 0.8mm for 256GB and 512GB, and 0.9mm for 1TB.

According to Kioxia, the products with capacities of 256GB and 512GB have already started sample shipments this month, while the 1TB product will be available for shipment after June, and the sample specifications may differ from the final mass production versions.