Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Flash Memory Won't Get Cheaper Any Time Soon

Posted by Soulskill on from the and-you'll-forget-to-send-in-the-rebate-anyway dept.

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."

1 of 166 comments (clear)

  1. Depends on your definition of "soon" by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.