Stefan Mileschin

Toshiba is introducing their first SSD using 96-layer 3D NAND flash memory. The new Toshiba XG6 is an update to their XG5 client NVMe SSD for the OEM market. The new 3D TLC NAND should help reduce costs, and will also allow for significantly higher performance. The XG5's performance wasn't competitive with high-end NVMe drives but was plenty for most purposes, and the XG5 was the first NVMe SSD to offer power efficiency similar to SATA SSDs on a variety of workloads. Toshiba promises similar efficiency from the XG6 in spite of the increased performance.

The Toshiba XG6 is still using the same controller as the XG5, so the improvements are mostly due to the new NAND flash, plus some firmware optimizations. The new 96L 3D TLC supports Toggle NAND 3.0 interface speeds in the 667-800MT/s range compared to the 400-533MT/s speeds used by earlier 3D NAND from Toshiba, so data can be moved between the controller and the NAND more quickly (Toshiba didn't disclose the exact speed used on the XG6). The 96L NAND itself has shorter read and program times than the 64L BiCS3 TLC, so the faster interface won't go to waste. The NAND page size hasn't increased, so there isn't any extra overhead for managing small IO sizes compared to what the XG5 has to cope with. As with the XG5, the XG6 will use a mix of 256Gb and 512Gb TLC dies depending on the drive capacity, so the smaller models won't suffer as much from the reduced level of parallelism that would come from using the largest (and cheapest) die across the entire range.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13096...th-96l-3d-nand