Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Improving upon current SSDs will require new technology! Isn't that sort of implied in the whole concept of, you know, progress?
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.
Yeah, they like to push the P-RAM a lot.
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...
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*.
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
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.