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Is SSD Density About To Hit a Wall?

Posted by Soulskill on from the right-into-a-brick-wall dept.

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."

23 of 208 comments (clear)

  1. The cure is the memristor by symbolset · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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  2. So... by dcmoebius · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Improving upon current SSDs will require new technology! Isn't that sort of implied in the whole concept of, you know, progress?

    1. Re:So... by AllynM · · Score: 4, Informative

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

      Allyn Malventano, CTNC, USN
      Storage Editor, PC Perspective

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      this sig was brought to you by the letter /.
  3. The wall, and the end of the world. by durrr · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:The wall, and the end of the world. by MichaelSmith · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      It has to happen.

      --
      http://michaelsmith.id.au
    2. Re:The wall, and the end of the world. by vadim_t · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:The wall, and the end of the world. by durrr · · Score: 3, Funny

      Well obviously the earth will be fried when the sun goes red giant. However I'm quite certain though that the year 5 billion AD equivalent of a electronics engineers will sit in jovian orbit, hellbent on the continuation of moores law and waiting for the sun to turn white dwarf so they can get to work with their new fancy sub-nm electron-degenerate matter lithography techniques.

      They'll wake you up from cryo when they're done just to taunt you: "Oh, we're having a few billion years between the nodes now, but it fits the curve, just as i told you."

    4. Re:The wall, and the end of the world. by X0563511 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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...

      --
      For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
    5. Re:The wall, and the end of the world. by smallfries · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

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  4. Does it matter? by MikeFM · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  5. Density halt, so work on price by markdavis · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Density halt, so work on price by grumbel · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

  6. Good riddance to Flash... by KonoWatakushi · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  7. Or more likely PCM by Wesley+Felter · · Score: 3, Informative

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

    1. Re:Or more likely PCM by owlstead · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yeah, they like to push the P-RAM a lot.

    2. Re:Or more likely PCM by cheesybagel · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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...

    3. Re:Or more likely PCM by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  8. Sure it might hit a wall... by gman003 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  9. Re:Just lower the manufacturing cost by my+$anity++0 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  10. clouds mean rain by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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*.

  11. Slow news day. by twidarkling · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  12. 34nm is better tech than 25nm by 0111+1110 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

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  13. Re:Use the 5.25" bays by Lehk228 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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

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