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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.'"
Yeah, there's NO way that SSD technology will somehow evolve further than it has till now. It's after all SEVERAL years old by now!
While the reasoning is interesting, and valid for all I know, why are we trying to say some bit of technology isn't going to work out ever? What's the point? Either it won't work out and that will be something the market will handle independent of whether you foresaw it or not, or a solution will be found and you'll just be wrong.
I'm reminded of an Arthur C. Clarke quote: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
Newer solid state memory technologies. If you can get something more durable and faster than NAND at the lithographies we're headed towards, you'll be able to expand capacity without having to jam tons of extra chips in for bad block swapouts and having to pack killer levels of ECC.
Exactly my thoughts. Who says we have to stick with a 2.5" or 3.5" form factor. There are many ways to pack more bits into a package if you stop thinking of SSDs as a spinning wheel of rust.
The bottom line is that there are limits to how small things can get with current technology.
They're right, SSDs won't replace hard drives with the current technology. If only we had a way to improve technology over time!
How many of these could you fit in the space of a standard HD case?
I know, someone's gonna lecture me on how this isn't at all a fair comparison...
Correct me if I'm wrong here - and I usually am wrong - but aren't we "limited" now only by controllers and the *price* of the NAND chips? I've read anandtech's last few SSD manifestos and it seems the controllers' speeds and the price of the NAND - not really anything else - is limiting their absolute capacity. I recall engadget doing several reviews of SATA and PCI-E SSDs with capacities up to 1TB. Granted the 1TB Z-drive was between $1,500 to $2,000 back in March of 2009, but you get the idea. We can make a very large SSD today. It's just not affordable.
To wit, who honestly has a larger than 1TB disk inside their machine right now? I'd imagine not terribly many, as a percentage of all computer owners. Indeed at home I have twin 700-ish GB Caviar Blacks in a RAID 1 configuration, of which I'm using maybe 30% of their capacity.
TFA doesn't actually make any arguments about price directly. It indirectly suggests price of the drives is related to lithography resolution, but provides nothing to back that up.
It seems to me that over time as yields on current technology increase and fab costs are recouped, the price of current technology will go down.
So if we can make a 1TB disk today, it'll be the same 1TB disk in a year or two, except less expensive, probably faster, and probably more reliable.
Yes, we always do. Don't underestimate the space needed to store pr0n.
Sure, but you already can't store significant scientific datasets on consumer-grade equipment. Nobody's saying that hard drives will cease to exist, but it's quite possible that SSDs will displace them in consumer-grade machines, the kind normal people buy.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You sound like me when I got my first 250MB drive. Shit! This will last me forever!
And it would have if I had kept running DOS.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
The problem with "online" storage is that you can end up offline.
When that happens, the fact that my phone can hold my entire music collection is a handy thing.
It always amazes me when people talk about the cloud as if all of the necessary network infastructure was already there. It's not. Mobile networking is CRAP and mobile networking providers seem intent on also making it EXPENSIVE too.
It's the cloud that sucks. SSDs have potential. Their main problem is that they're terribly expensive. They are not likely to overtake spinny disks any time soon because of this.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Something tells me by your post that you don't really need to worry about eliminating women from your sex life, I'm pretty sure they do that naturally do to instinct when you get too close.
Creepy is just as effective at eliminating women from your sex life as anything science can produce.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager