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Flash Memory Won't Get Cheaper Any Time Soon
jfruh writes "Some melancholy news from the Hot Chips symposium last week: NAND memory, which powers the solid-state drives that have revolutionized storage, has broken the $1 per gigabyte barrier and isn't getting any cheaper. 'They will always be ten times the cost of a hard drive,' says analyst Jim Handy. There are newer technologies in development, but they won't be able to beat NAND on price for years."
Oh first world problems.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
....having a perfect track record and all.
What the article actually says in the last paragraph is that there's currently a capacity shortage, that's expected to be resolved by 2015. The article also says manufacturers think they can go down another process node, and then do another 3 after that using 3D stacking. Then he says new technologies "with the speed of DRAM and the storage capacity of NAND" might make their way out of the lab next year.
Overall, the article's contents don't really seem to support the notion that it's game over for SSD capacity improvements.
So can we please stop comparing SSDs to platter-drives, please? Thanks.
Spin 'em if you got 'em.
A 4TB hdd can be had for roughly USD$200, or less. A 4TB SDD is USD$29k.
No one will ever need more than 512k of RAM ... no one will ever want to carry around a wireless phone ... 3D TV's are going to take over the marketplace ... vinyl albums, no wait 8-tracks, no wait cassettes, no wait CDs, no wait mp3's are the final medium for entertainment.
"[NAND memory] isn't getting any cheaper" combined with "they will always be ten times the cost of a hard drive" could mean either:(a) both SSD:s and spinning drives will suddenly stop getting cheaper for no apparent reason or (b) Whoever wrote TFA and TFS are morons who doesn't realize that the first statement doesn't follow from the second.
I'm guessing (b).
"Flash Memory Won't Get Cheaper Any Time Soon" and "They will always be ten times the cost of a hard drive," are two completely different things. The article is saying two things:
1: Other technologies are unlikely to overtake flash on price/performance in the near future
2: Flash will always be 10x cost of harddrives. In other words, Flash won't overtake harddrives on price.
However, Flash will continue to get cheaper per capcity, at least for now, as will harddrives. It'll be a race where Flash will never be able to catch up.
The article makes clear that at least for now, Flash will continue to undergo price reductions until limits are reached. It being a silicon based product, it is going to be limited by the same basic manufacturing and feature shrinking limits of most other silicon chips. There may be advancements similar to MLC that are specific to flash, but otherwise the same rules apply. Decrease feature size, and you fit more features int he die, decreasing cost.
We would all be stuck using 1.2ghz CPUs requiring exotic liquid cooling because we've hit the limit on die shrinks.
We would all be stuck with 500GB hard drives because there is no way to increase areal density of HDD platters
We would all be stuck on 1.5mbps DSL lines because there is no cost effective way to push data quickly over consumer grade circuits
We would all be on Windows Phone because MS was going to out innovate Apple and Google.
The doomsday soothsayers have been around forever and usually have zero clue on upcoming innovations. Guess these type of articles "sell eyeballs"
I am especially interested in Crossbar's RRAM technology. I think it has the potential to absolutely crush NAND in both price and performance. So, this guy is likely wrong.
"War makes me sad." - Me
The things are almost completely machine made. They should be damn near free. What a bunch of thieves...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Are you guys paid to promote SSD this month?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
NAND is never going to beat my favorite storage volume: /dev/null. No matter how much I write, it never seems to get full.
Thanks for slashdot stalking me dude! It made my day to have you go through my comments.
Anyway, my post on this topic was meant to be funny, although I realize it's not that funny.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
2 years? Yeah I believe him!
has broken the $1 per gigabyte barrier
It isn't a barrier. $1 is a COMPLETELY arbitrary value. Examples of real barriers are the sound barrier or the clock speed vs. power barrier (region) of silicon. A monetary barrier between low and middle class would be being able to pay for a new car with cash.
There has to be a solid justification to call it such. Otherwise, I could jump up and down SCREAMING that we have just crossed the 98 cent barrier.
A dollar a gig, cool! But no one crossed a real BARRIER.
captcha: barrier
"Prices have been stable and will be flat until 2015..."
So the article says they won't get cheaper for 2 years. Hardly forever (and probably even that is wrong).
I was worried that Flash might stay expensive for a while, but now that an analyst is predicting it I know it won't actually happen. So, expect a massive crashing in prices pretty much immediately.
I've been waiting and watching...
I have a sub-$300 laptop.
$170 for a 256 GB drive is the perfect size but the price is a joke;
$90 for a 128 GB drive is a tad small, but it's still way too expensive;
$60 for a 64 GB is almost reasonable price but it's way too small;
$40 for a 32 GB drive is the perfect price, but the size is a joke.
Start selling 128GB drives for $40 and we'll talk...
When you have an industry where there are a lot of different manufacturers that are not illegally colluding in any way, of course prices are going to avoid dropping. particularly when the first item made costs a million bucks and every one after that costs a fraction of a cent. I refuse to believe anyone who says that this is a self serving claim so that people will go ahead and buy all that they might ever use now and avoid waiting for better prices.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Will start cheaper than a buck a gig as it will be much higher density and cheaper to manufacture bigger sizes per 2d surface area... so blah blah blah...
mem-ristors probably won't be cheaper any time soon, but the other one that was introduced within the last 3 months (at least I first read about it during this time frame) was also going to be cheaper than flash to start out with, with 10x the density and 100x the durability.
So this sounds like a tech report to prop up stock prices on false profit reports.
... collusion and profiteering, maybe racketeering. I think the only reason Samsung produced TLC was to use it as a buffer to justify continuing to keep the prices of MLC artificially high. Hopefully other manufacturers, since they don't (yet) also produce TLC to compete directly with Samsung, will instead finally reduce their MLC prices to compete with TLC. There might be some sort of gentlemens' agreement preventing that, though, since Samsung's TLC can buffer the MLC prices for the entire industry, not just its own MLC.
Actually, flash memory will continue to drop in price. Maybe not as much as hard drives have in the past 10 years, but it will continue to drop. I would be willing to bet $0.25 on it.
You say that a high price on flash will hurt development, but when you can fit Wikipedia English into 9GB + 1GB space for the bzreader index file (a good chunk of human knowledge right there), what more do you need?
You need a maybe 1-2GB more for an OS (not Windows) with office suite, browser, some learning tools, dev platforms, etc. Give yourself and the OS some breathing room, and we're only up to $16 of flash. That's a whole lot less than a fixed disk, and you've still got several GBs free.
So I still don't see how this is much of a problem. You could push prices below $1/GB, but it would take a huge sea change (drop to $.25 or less) to make a real difference in the price of the device they are installed in. There's already plenty of storage for a reasonable price, if you're willing to forgo luxuries like porn :D
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
I can't preorder the FagPhone 5S!!! First-world problems strike again!!
Sent from my FagPhone 5 that is shoved in my rectum
I was at the Flash Memory Summit last month and everyone there that actually makes the stuff seems to disagree... Whether going 3D or moving toward 16nm planar, or any of the post-NAND technologies, the the price/GB will get noticeably cheaper every year. The only reason it is expensive now is that the supply wasn't ready for the demand.
Finally ! We are going to get lean and efficient code again instead of the current trend towards more and more bloated stuff ! (There weren't any bloody Blahblahtoolbars or N different themes in those ZX-81-1kB-and-that's-all-days, huh ?! Not even with the 16kB RAM pack either.)
Some "expert" whining that flash can't get any cheaper because of fabs, limitations, etc, etc.
Well, I'm not buying it. Until I start hearing something from the people who actually make the tech, I'm going to say it'll probably keep going. Supply issues are just temporary. Companies can, and are, building new fabs all over. In terms of overall cost that has been getting reduced by both process size (which doesn't seem to be stopping soon) and by advances in how data is stored. Recently we've started to have TLC flash drives, which store 3 bits per location. This comes at a cost of write/erase cycles but it turns out that you don't really write that much data in normal desktop usage, so that works out ok, and you can over provision more as you have more storage.
Eventually I'm sure we'll hit a wall of some sort, but I think there's quite a ways to go.
Also, the question isn't if they are as cheap as magnetic drives. The question is if they are cheap enough for the capacity people need and these days the answer is generally "yes". Most people don't need 4TB of storage. I don't mean that in a condescending way, I mean that they actually wouldn't use it if they had it. Hence a smaller SSD can work perfectly fine. 500GB, or less, tends to do the trick real well for most people. So it doesn't matter if you can get a big HDD, it matters if you can get a fast SSD that is cheap enough to be affordable.
For higher capacity usages, well ya, HDDs are still great and still used. We got a big ole' NAS not too long ago using magnetic drives. We needed a lot of storage and didn't want to spend tons of money since performance wasn't a big issue.
As somebody who has used flash memory in many designs over many years in many environments (since the devices first hit the market) I do not think average users are aware of the down-sides. Flash storage starts failing the moment you start using it. Repeated writes to the same block eventually cause the block to fail (something that does not happen in spinning magnetic media). Systems that use flash have various means of hiding this from the user (generally by reserving blocks of free flash and re-mapping them to replace the failed blocks as those blocks fail). This is OK for storage where you occasionally write to it, but it's a terrible idea in applications like desktop systems that are always writing to the disk (logging activities, simulating more free RAM by swapping to disk, etc). Typical disk formats make this worse by having data structures that require reading perfectly good blocks, patching them, and writing them back (for things like directories and allocation).
For rugged, fast, low-power and/or portable storage Flash is excellent. As a replacement for a magnetic drive in a system used by an average user.....probably not a great idea (an average user will likely replace it before he notices it degrading). For a serious user/developer who hammers his drive with lots of compile/test/debug activities and lots of data file writing, log files, etc.... BAD idea and probably more likely to result in data loss in a non-RAID setup.
a 1TB Samsung 840 EVO is around $600-$700
So for 4TB that's about $2400-$2800, maybe around 12x if you aren't counting that you'd need multiple SSD's.
And the reason is... not your reason...
The actual reason is that as costs go down, capacity goes up as a moving maxima on a bell curve.
It'd be cheap to buy the capacities of flash storage we have today in the future, but they won't be manufactured; instead we'll have much higher capacities at about the current price point.
The saddle spot where you get the-best-bang-for-the-buck will stay at about the same price point going forward as capacities increase. This is the same thing that happened with hard drives, and it's the same thing that happened with RAM. Read some Clayton Christensen to find out why.
Flash memory is getting cheaper and cheaper every year, oh NAND ... well flash drives use NAND and get cheaper every year, oh the specific types of NAND for use in solid state drives. Make us twist your nipple why dont you
For that multimedia you speak of, a rotating drive will be about as fast. A 10K rpm platter drive makes a lot more sense for video, which is sequential access.
When SSDs get faster for sequential access, then I'll be interested in larger. I don't see any need for many TBs of tiny files, and SSD is only impressive with small files. Very large databases are about the only use case I can think of for large SSDs, and maybe media laptops. Even with 40TB of data, I only want a 128GB PCIe SSD for caching.
NAND is going to be 3d stacked, and it's going to at the very least provide another 10 years of life to NAND before resistive RAM or another technology finally takes over.
Even 1 single process tick (whether it be reducing size below 20nm, or stacking a layer of NAND with a 3D process) will bring the cost below the so called "$1 barrier".
"Samsung has big plans for future iterations of the V-NAND tech, including 3D chips with up to 24 layers, all connected by using "special etching technology" to drill down through the layers and connect them electronically."
It's an ignorant article, and it provides no content beyond stirring up all of the slashdot commenters who can clearly see that there is no credence to the "article".
I had a 1 GHz CPU around 10 years ago. Right now I'm using a 1.2 GHz. Before that, CPU speeds would double every few years.
Okay, I cheated because my current 1.2 GHz fits in my pocket. I do have two machines with five year old CPUs that run 3-3.5 GHz, the same speed as a new machine five years later. So there ARE some real physical limits. That's why phones are dual core and servers have eight cores - because they couldn't make faster processors they had to join together more processors running at the same old speed.
... 640 Kb should be enough... ... watch out son, that gun is loaded... .... THe price of 1 GB will not go much below 1$....
Well, maybe the dollar is the problem that will be solved then, not as much the scale of the process.....