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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."
Improving upon current SSDs will require new technology! Isn't that sort of implied in the whole concept of, you know, progress?
The wall or plateu or whatever you prefer to call it of electronics progress is similar to the recurring doomsday predictions. It's always right around the corner, but it never happens.
I guess we could liken it to fusion, strong AI, the second coming of Jesus and whatever else that generally is put in the belive it when see it folder.
It doesn't seem a big deal to me. I'd be more interested in seeing the prices drop and to have larger RAM caches.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Well, the density is already not bad, so the big key is to get the cost down! For larger applications of Flash memory(like over 250GB) I don't think the physical size is going to be a problem because it is competing with 3.5" and 2.5" hard drives.
Aside from cost, there are plenty of other non-density things to work on: number of rewrite cycles, speed, reliability, etc. I can't wait for the day that spinning media eventually goes bye-bye.
Density = Cost
The more bits per cm^2 of silicon, the less silicon you need to buy in order to store your stuff. When people talk about density, they aren't talking about the physical size of the consumer SSD product, they mean density of feature size on the silicon chips. It's expensive to refine, process, and manufacture super high end silicon. That's why flash tends to scale quite linearly with storage size in a way that mechanical drives never have. The price really is dominated in a large way by the amount of silicon, which dictates the number of bits. To drive down the price, put more bits on less silicon, and you have a winner.
Other options, like figuring out how to use shittier silicon in cheaper fabs to drive down price are also worth some R+D, but density is the proven method for driving down the price.
But, if the technology hits a brick wall, the fab won't need retooling because there will be no cutting edge technology, increasing the amount of years of useful life, and eventually lowering price. It's slower than the lowering by developing better tech, though, one would assume.
Local storage is a lot cheaper and faster for most people in the USA, which is all I can speak of. Maybe over in Utopialand where everyone has 100 gig speed connections and hosting is pennies a day for terrabytes the "cloud" might be cheaper and better. Our domestic broadband speeds and prices are not even close to keeping up with increased local storage density and lowering prices for same. Saying the "cloud" will do everything is sorta naive, we have all the major ISPs talking about limits and caps now. This is 100% the WRONG time to be shifting to far away "cloud" storage for most people.
I know I'll be keeping my movies and files handy right here, thanks. I just can't see storing multiple gig sized movies way over there someplace when it would cost me two cents to store it here and have it playback at fast streaming speeds for the cost of the electricity.
Having to go pay yet again to watch your movie or access your own file..nope. The "cloud" is a marketing buzzword for companies that want to charge you serious coin for access to *your own files*.
You know, stories like this used to interest me. Then I noticed that:
a) they kept reoccurring, and
b) had a common theme.
Yeah, it's always "We're approaching a wall with what can be done with current technology, so it's going to either be more expensive, or need a new technique, yadda yadda." Tell you what. Lemme know when we *actually* hit the wall in ANY of these that they keep threatening us with a wall in making, SSD, HDD, CPU size, etc.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
most SSD units are laptop sized, the desktop kits are the same drive with a bracket. no reason you couldn't make huge SSD's on current tech that filled the space of a 3.5" drive bay, let alone a 5.25
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Can you point to a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM or BD-ROM drive that can read my CD-ROMs faster than 72x?
You're right, come to think of it, there haven't been any major advancements in the speed of floppy and ZIP drives, either!
That was the the parent's point: instead of trying to spin CDs faster, we went to DVDs and then BDs (about 4 times faster than a 72X CD).
How much faster are CPUs now?
Considerably. While mostly not relying on increases in clock speed. That was the point.
sic transit gloria mundi
194 GB/cc is about 8e10 atoms per bit, assuming 2 Angstrom atoms. Since it's going to be really difficult to store more than 1 bit per atom, that sets a hard limit of improvement at 8e10 times what's available today.
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Wow. Thank fuck no one listens to you. I like progress.