TrendForce Consulting released a research report the day before yesterday, indicating that this year’s enterprise-level QLC solid-state drive shipments will quadruple due to the demand for AI inference servers, reaching 30EB (note: approximately 31.46 million TB).
The report states that AI inference servers primarily use storage media for reading rather than writing, which is less frequent than in AI training servers. Although enterprise-level QLC solid-state drives are less durable in writing than TLC drives, they are not inferior in reading and also have a cost advantage.
Compared to enterprise-level mechanical hard drives, enterprise-level QLC solid-state drives have a clear advantage in speed and lower energy consumption. Enterprise-level QLC solid-state drives can now achieve a capacity of 61.44TB, which is significantly larger than the common 20~24TB of enterprise-level mechanical hard drives.
AI, especially AI training, is a high-energy-consuming application, and large AI server customers are increasingly valuing the energy efficiency of storage products.
Enterprise-level QLC solid-state drives are more energy-efficient than mechanical hard drives and require less physical space, giving them an advantage in overall Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), which has driven the adoption of QLC solid-state drives by AI inference servers.
Specifically, only Samsung and Solidigm’s enterprise-level QLC solid-state drives have passed validation tests; therefore, these two companies will benefit from this trend, especially Solidigm, which is actively promoting QLC products.
In the second half of the year, Solidigm will expand the production of 144-layer QLC flash memory; although Samsung Electronics will start mass production of the ninth generation V-NAND flash memory QLC version in the second half of the year, it will still mainly use 176-layer (seventh generation V-NAND) QLC flash memory.
The report estimates that the tight supply of high-capacity QLC products will continue to drive up the contract prices of enterprise-level solid-state drives in the third quarter, with an increase of about 5~10%.
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