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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.
"[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).
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
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.
Made by machines in $10B fab plants that need to be payed off before they are obsolete.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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
And I'm sure all of the materials, and power are provided for free, too. And the design work. Not to mention the shipping costs.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
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.
Careful there... you actually just might be right about some of those...
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
"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.
So... when do we get our spinning platters of NAND memory?
... 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.
Figure out the human effort involved and work on that. "What the market will bear" means "How much can I rip a guy off without going to jail". If the margins are so low, why are the owners so rich? Consumers have to stand up and demand better accounting and pricing. Unfortunately they make up such a tiny part of the economy, there's no clout to be had. "Consumers" that make a difference are just other companies, and the massive amount of trade amongst them (in the same fashion car dealers swap inventory to make it look like a sale) is what sets the price we pay. Gotta find a way to scare them straight.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
It's bogus. This is the new railroad, blocking the rights of way for anybody else. It's too heavily monopolized with bullshit patents and copyrights.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
If the margins are so low, why are the owners so rich?
Did you fail basic arithmetic in 4th grade???
Hey, They are the ones pissing and moaning about how little they make. They all look pretty plump to me. We have to get some real competition into the system, and prices will come down tout de suite.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Patents are a part of it, but they're minuscule compared to the capital requirements. Semiconductor manufacture isn't a basement hobbyist game; it's the absolute cutting edge of technology, and the people who make the machines that make the chips are creating custom, precision hardware for a very small customer base. Commercial-scale semiconductor plants run about $1 billion minimum, for a 10k-30k wafers per month "minifab" and can run up to $8-10 billion for a "gigafab" churning out 80k-100k wafers per month.
Read more at SemiWiki.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
You realize the companies you're talking about are almost all public? Of which the balance sheets and P&Ls are available in the 10Q/Ks filed with the SEC every quarter, fully viewable just a few clicks away?
If you want to make a direct difference, you can. Fire up Etrade and buy a few shares of Micron or any other tech company you feel is gouging or not fairly considering "human effort". Then you'll (literally) be one of the "rich owners" and can voice your concerns at their annual meeting.
Having said that, collusion is the complaint you're really referring to, but just didn't know it. And that's already deemed illegal so you can rest easy now.
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 that's already deemed illegal so you can rest easy now.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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
Except that charging more for semiconductors probably wouldn't land anybody in jail. So, your premise is very confusing. If somebody wanted to start a factory for NAND and charge more that what anybody else does, then they are perfectly entitled. It's not a very good business model, and they probably won't make any money because very few people would want to buy the product. But, they could do it if they wanted. You seem to have some very strange beliefs about how the economy works, which are pretty consistently contrary to how the economy actually works.
Just like your previous claim that "It's made by a machine, so it costs less." In the end, you are only ever paying for human labor or location. That's it. Whether naked people make a product bare handed, use simple stone tools, or high end fab equipment is all irrelevant. The chips cost a lot of money because somebody has to build the fab equipment, somebody has to operate it, and you need somewhere to put it all. They sell for a high price because there is a market of people who see that the product is more valuable to them than having that many dollars in their pocket.
http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/guidelines/211578.htm
There's even a contact address at the bottom of the page you can use to report the signs of collusion you've witnessed: antitrust.complaints@usdoj.gov.
Anyway, that's how it works in the grownup world.
Yeah right, 99% of the complaints go straight to the round file. In the grownup world, things don't go like it says in your little schoolbook there. In the grownup world, you need fat cat connections to make things work at all. So please, save it. Better yet, you know where to put your patronizing bullshit.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I know how the 'economy' works. It's based on greed, and doing what you can to take out the competition. Customer 'value' is entirely subjective and subject to speculation which distorts the market. Price is fixed by the highest bidder who can buy in bulk. Price based on cost of production is precisely the opposite, and allows the customer to set a fair price, and opens up a much wider market and makes it more accessible. Knowing the cost of production allows us to set prices, not some ghost corporation that buys up inventory to inflate prices.
The games these people play use a different rule book than the one you're looking at. They collude, bribe. lobby, and even burn down their factories if the market becomes too saturated. All shortages are artificial, simply market manipulation.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Your original premise is that things should be almost free. When you reach the ripe old age of 18 and enter the real world, you'll slowly realize it's actually good that things aren't free.
And perhaps realize that society is composed of individuals, most of which are not all that bad. Then proceed on to actually enjoying life, and take the tribulations in stride.
Good night.
Made by machines in $10B fab plants that need to be payed off before they are obsolete.
Shhh ... Marx was pretty sure that all the means of production we'll ever need had been already developed and built.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
This, and the chemicals used in the manufacture of semiconductors are of extremely high purity and precision. I work for a manufacturer of such chemicals, and I'm amazed at the amount of thought and innovation that is thrown at maintaining and improving the quality of our product. Additionally, the solutions are typically custom tailored to the application, even down to the customer's process line. Everything that can even obliquely affect the final product is regulated and and detailed at length. I can't so much as move a printer in our lab without writing a whitepaper and requesting the change from the customer. We're talking a 2-3 month turn around time. This sort of service does not come cheap. And I'm just talking about the chemical side of the business.
2: Flash will always be 10x cost of harddrives. In other words, Flash won't overtake harddrives on price.
That's assuming that hard drives keep getting bigger and cheaper. The amount of R&D money required for each generation of improvement (in most technology) goes up, but the spending for HDDs has gone down as manufacturers see that they're hitting diminishing returns. The number of people who will pay for 4TB disks is lower than the number that will pay for 2TB, which is lower than the number that will pay for 1TB disks and so on. For a lot of users, even 500GB is more than they will need for the lifetime of a disk.
The minimum costs for an SSD are lower than the minimum costs for an HDD. Currently, the smallest disks I can find are about 300GB, and they cost about as much as a 64GB SSD. If you bring an 8TB disk to market now, you're betting that enough people will buy it at a premium price to recoup your R&D expenses before SSDs (Flash or some other technology) pass it in capacity. But now, a lot of the people who traditionally bought the high-end disks are buying SSDs and they're caring more about latency and throughput than capacity. If you show an insanely expensive disk that gives 10x the capacity of the current best, most of these people will say 'meh,' but if you show them a disk that can do 10x the IOPS then they'll ask how much and how soon you can deliver. This gives a big incentive to concentrate R&D spending on SSDs.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
... 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.....
Intel makes a decent chunk of Net profit, but they reinvest 50% of their earnings back into R&D, then another huge portion back into making new fabs. They have a lot of value in assets and move around huge amounts of money, but nearly all of their value is tied up in investments and assets and not cash.