Is SSD Density About To Hit a Wall?

Zombie Puggle writes "Enterprise Storage Forum has an article contending that solid state disks will stay stuck at 20-25nm unless the materials and techniques used to design Flash drives changes, and soon. 'Anything smaller and the data protection and data corruption issues become so great that either the performance is abysmal, the data retention period doesn't meet JEDEC standards, or the cost increases. Though engineers are working on performance and density improvements via new technologies (they're also trying to drive costs down), these are fairly new techniques and are not likely to make it into devices for a while."

Comments

The cure is the memristor

[symbolset]

Memristor technology doesn't even work with feature sizes that big, so it's the logical next step. Also it can be layered and so leverage Dimension Z. Products expected in three years from a joint HP and Hynix venture. No worries.

Good riddance to Flash...

[KonoWatakushi]

There are far better technologies waiting to replace it, one being P-RAM. The best thing is, none of the newer tech is subject to Flash's crippling block-erase semantics, and so they are far more suitable for SSDs. No longer will SSDs require tremendously complex controllers and firmware in order to attain good performance, allowing new SSDs to be both cheaper, faster, and more reliable.

Or more likely PCM

[Wesley Felter]

HP and Hynix are doing memristors, while the entire rest of the industry is doing phase-change memory.

Re:The wall, and the end of the world.

[vadim_t]

That's not practical though.

At that speed, the signal will travel about 0.6cm per clock cycle. Even at current clock rates at least one clock cycle will pass while the signal simply travels to the RAM chip on the motherboard, without accounting for any circuitry, just the time spent on the wire.

Re:So...

[AllynM]

*EVERY* SSD is a 'specialized RAID package'.

Allyn Malventano, CTNC, USN
Storage Editor, PC Perspective

Re:Density halt, so work on price

[grumbel]

why is everybody so excited about getting rid of spinning media?

Because the spinning media is what makes my modern Dual Core computer feel as sluggish as an old Windows98 laptop. Access time on HDD is basically the single largest bottleneck current day computers have when it comes to responsiveness. It just doesn't matter how fast your CPU and GPU are when they are both idling waiting for the HDD to catch up.

Re:The wall, and the end of the world.

[smallfries]

Well, ..... no. There are many things wrong with your post but the biggest one is that you don't seem to be able to double numbers properly. Did you pull 1Tbit out of your ass?

Moore originally speculated about transistor density doubling every 12 months - but his actual observation that was published was that density doubles every 18 months. This is the figure that has been used for decades when people talk about his "law". In more recent times (the last decade or so) that period has increased to 2 years.

log_18mths(12yrs) = 8
log_24mths(12yrs) = 6

So, if we accept your claim about 1Gbit chips in 1999 then we would expect chips in the range 64Gbit - 256Gbit. A long way off of the 1Tb that you used. Assuming that you mean flash when you say "ram chip" a quick search shows that 64Gbit chips were available in 2007. So your conclusion is bogus.