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

Sure it might hit a wall...

[gman003]

but who says the wall is going to win that collision? I've seen it time and time again: a problem is encountered, and dealt with. Optical disk rotation speed. Parallel data buses. Processor clock speeds. They all hit a wall, and we got around that wall. We lowered the wavelength of the laser instead of go to 56x CDs. We switched to serial buses when parallel encountered clocking issues. We switched to multicore processors when we couldn't keep upping the gigahertz. I'm fully confident we'll figure out a solution to this problem as well, whether it be new manufacturing techniques, memristors, or just larger Flash chips.

Re:Or more likely PCM

[cheesybagel]

Phase-change memory... Oh dear. I still remember when it was being pushed as Ovonic Unified Memory (OUM) or calcogenics. I certainly hope Samsung and the usual suspects can get this to work. But it has been a long time in coming. Well, maybe not as long as MRAM but still...

34nm is better tech than 25nm

[0111 1110]

The smaller the NAND flash process size the shorter the write endurance and data retention times. A 25nm NAND flash SSD will have a much shorter lifespan and hold data for a much shorter period of time than current 34nm tech. Does this mean that 2010 NAND flash SSDs will be better than 2011 ones? Well I guess that depends on how much you value reliability and longevity in your storage devices. Lower cost and shorter life is a win/win for the manufacturers. This limit on NAND flash technology has been known since the start. I don't see the big deal. Just stop at 34nm and work at other technologies that are faster or scale in size better. We usually think of larger process size as being better, but in this case it's not.

http://features.techworld.com/storage/3212075/is-nand-flash-about-to-hit-a-dead-end/?intcmp=ft-hm-m

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1492711

Re:Or more likely PCM

[TheRaven64]

PC-RAM stands a good chance of being the long-term future (I had the good fortune recently to share a very nice bottle of port with one of the scientists behind underlying technology, and came away quite convinced, and a lot drunk), but the largest currently shipping PC-RAM modules are 64MB. It has a lot of catching up to do before it reaches, let alone passes, the density of flash.

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

[X0563511]

I'd like to see stuff start getting tougher.

When that 2Tb SSD can fall 4 stories (while in use) and carry on without even noticing, then I start getting tingles...