Why SSDs Won't Replace Hard Drives

storagedude writes "Flash drive capacities have been expanding dramatically in recent years, but this article says that's about to change, in part because of the limits of current lithography technology. Meanwhile, disk drive densities will continue to grow, which the author says will mean many years before solid state drives replace hard drives — if they ever do. From the article: 'The bottom line is that there are limits to how small things can get with current technology. Flash densities are going to have data density growth problems, just as other storage technologies have had over the last 30 years. This should surprise no one. And the lithography problem for flash doesn't end there. Jeff Layton, Enterprise Technologist for HPC at Dell, notes that as lithography gets smaller, NAND has more and more troubles — the voltages don't decrease, so the probability of causing an accidental data corruption of a neighboring NAND goes up. "So at some point, you just can't reduce the size and hope to not have data corruption," notes Layton.'"

Comments

Re:Selective evolution

[DJRumpy]

I'm in agreement with this except holographic storage has a few major drawbacks. Although SSD is steller for smaller storage requirements, platter drives are just too slow to be of much more use. Some highlights for holographic storage that should be pointed out first:

The theoretical limits for the storage density of this technique is approximately several tens of Terabytes (1 terabyte = 1024 gigabytes) per cubic centimeter
Another factor: photographic media has the longest proven lifespan - over a century - of any modern media. Since there’s no physical contact you can read the media millions of times with no degradation.

Unfortunately, the current limitations make this a far off product that probably won't see the light of day for many years.

The initial prototype was only capable of 20 MB/sec. Although this isn't horrible for optical storage, it's hardly a top performer
Although the theoretical limits are almost infinite, the reality of the prototypes were only about 300 MB. They have already fallen behind platter based storage.
Seek times were in the area of 200 ms, which is also pretty poor compared to platter storage.

With all of that said, there have been viable advances in holographic storage. HVD's (Holographic Versatile Disc) show true promise.

These discs have the capacity to hold up to 6 terabytes (TB) of information. The HVD also has a transfer rate of 1 Gbit/s (125 MB/s). Sony, Philips, TDK, Panasonic and Optware all plan to release 1 TB capacity discs in 2019 while Maxell plans one for early 2020 with a capacity of 500 GB and transfer rate of 20 MB/s[2]—although HVD standards were approved and published on June 28, 2007, no company has released an HVD as of July of 2010.

Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc