Slashdot Mirror
SSD Latency, Error Rates May Spell Bleak Future
Lucas123 writes "A new study by the University of California and Microsoft shows that NAND flash memory experiences significant performance degradation as die sizes shrink in size. Over the next dozen years latency will double as the circuitry size shrinks from 25 nanometers today, to 6.5nm, the research showed. Speaking at the Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies in San Jose this week, Laura Grupp, a graduate student at the University of California, said tests of 45 different types of NAND flash chips from six vendors using 72nm to 25nm lithography techniques showed performance degraded across the board and error rates increased as die sizes shrunk. Triple-Level NAND performed the worst, followed by Multi-Level Cell NAND and Single-Level Cell. The researchers said MLC NAND-based SSDs won't be able to go beyond 4TB and TLC-based SSDs won't be able to scale past 16TB because of the performance degradation, so it appears the end of the road for SSDs will be 2024."
There will be other solid-state storage solutions. The only reason NAND is currently used is its relative cheapness and reliability.
An old study (well, executive) showed that there was a world wide demand for "maybe 6" computers. This might all be true at current technology levels but technology will have changed an awful lot by 2024.
Exactly, this quote at the end says it all: "However, even with TLC flash at 6.5nm, Grupp calculates that SSDs will continue to outperform hard disk drives on throughput, 32,000 IOPS to 200 IOPS, respectively."
We already have the breakthrough, but it's not Flash, it's PRAM.
And MRAM. And FeRAM.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It costs money to stack. At a much higher rate than it does to scale. Or at least that has been the case. It will be a significant hit to the industry when they can no longer count on device scaling to help bring up density, and get forced to wire multiple chips in ever expanding arrays.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Well, to start with you can make an SSD as big as you want by taking smaller SSD's and chaining them together with an intelligent front-end.
I could do the same thing with a bunch of 80 GB hard disks, but I'd rather just buy a 2 TB one and run that instead.
Did you know that your hard disk is actually already made out of multiple platters with smaller capacities that make up the whole transparently? Your RAM is made up of dozens of individual smaller chips that make up the total capacity, and so are existing SSDs and USB flash memory sticks.
Kids these days.