Slashdot Mirror
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!
With SSDs, I'm sure there is always another axis of improvement, similar to with CPUs, when you hit a wall with them, go SMP. When SMP doesn't scale, crank up the clock speed, etc.
What I wonder is what can be focused on to make SSDs be able to store more. We can always stick more chips in an enclosure, and the cooling needs for SSDs are far less than the cooling needed for CPUs.
Was plenty for my needs and boots Ubuntu in 20 seconds. Barely uses power when not in use. I'm a believer.
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."
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!
"Science reporting organizations have been expanding dramatically in recent years, but this article says that's about to change, in part because of the limits of current literacy education. Meanwhile, tabloid reporting will continue to grow, which the author says will mean many years before solid science reporting replaces sensationalism -- if they ever do. From the article: 'The bottom line is that there are limits to how smart things can get with current society. Universities are going to have student density growth problems, just as other societies have had over the last 30 years. This should surprise no one. And the literacy problem for journalism doesn't end there. Buff Clayton, Editor in chief for The Onion at Delaware, notes that as literacy gets smaller, science reporting has more and more troubles -- the bullshit PR releases don't decrease, so the probability of causing accidental sensationalism goes up. "So at some point, you just can't reduce the literacy and hope to not have reader confusion," notes Clayton.'"
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
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.
Correct me if I'm wrong here - and I usually am wrong -
I'm usually right... but that statement might be one of the exceptions. :)
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.
It's a basic maxim of the silicon industry that cost is directly proportional to die area. To simplify, you can consider the silicon fab to have a fixed cost per wafer. Therefore the more die fit on a wafer, the cheaper each chip becomes. The two main ways to do this are by reducing the amount of functionality on each chip (undesirable when the goal is to increase capacity), or to move to a smaller lithography so you can fit many more die on a wafer. While new lithography generations have frequently allowed greater performance, even if they don't they are deployed anyway because it reduces cost for the manufacturer.
Yield improvements and paying off R&D both will help cost, but only to a limited extent. Yields for a production lithography should already be quite high and will asymptotically approach 1. Once R&D is payed off the cost will drop, but there still remains a very large fixed cost per wafer. Neither is going to come close to the cost benefit of being able to, say, go from a 45nm to 32nm process and get roughly 40% more die per wafer.
So yeah price will come down for other reasons, but in the long term price reductions in flash memory devices are going to depend on using smaller lithographies just like it does for other semiconductor devices. The author probably just didn't think to explain this aspect of it, since it's such a well-known aspect of the silicon industry.
On the other hand, people were saying that CMOS processes used in CPUs were going to reach fundamental limits 20 years ago. And 15. And 10. And 5. And oh sure, some of those limits were reached, but then clever people worked around them. The statement in the article amounts to "We can't just blindly reduce lithography size without changing anything else indefinitely", which is true but also kinda pointless since the people working on smaller lithographies for flash are probably aware. In the end exponential progressions like this can't last for ever, but I'm not about to tell the process engineers that they aren't going to be able to find enough tricks to keep it going long enough.
The enemies of Democracy are
The most interesting man I never met lived in a small house near the beach, had newspapers and old chairs and magazines piled to the ceiling in every room. Must have had a thousand cubic feet of Life Magazine. A most exciting fellow. What the man could have done with a proper warehouse, who knows?
What will finally put Seagate out of business is the universal porn compressor: an algorithm to produce almost any image with a pornographic payload (validated through fMRI studies). Finally we can eliminate women from sex. It'll be great.
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