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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."
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.'"
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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...
I thought 10s boots were only true in fairy tales,
Meant for someone else, but not for me.
Yes, we always do. Don't underestimate the space needed to store pr0n.
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.
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