Flash Memory Won't Get Cheaper Any Time Soon

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Flash Memory Won't Get Cheaper Any Time Soon

Posted by Soulskill on Friday September 13, 2013 @07:45AM 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."

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No! by schneidafunk · 2013-09-13 07:47 · Score: 4, Funny

Oh first world problems.

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1. Re:No! by hairyfeet · 2013-09-13 08:08 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Actually this is as bad for the third world as well, because what do you think is used in all those ruggedized laptops and tablets in the middle of BF Africa? NAND Flash. The OLPC, smartphones (which is allowing many third world countries access for the first time to the WWW) all of these use NAND flash and as long as flash remains high it will hurt the poor more than those in the first world.
  
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2. Re:No! by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-13 08:10 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Oh goodie! It's the "Africa exists therefore you can't be dissatisfied with anything ever" argument.
3. Re:No! by Mitchell314 · 2013-09-13 08:21 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  I think you mean first hello world problems.
  
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4. Re: No! by jedidiah · 2013-09-13 08:54 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  What exactly are we in the West supposed to do about it really? Play globo-cop? Encourage our governments to meddle in the affairs of other countries?
  Really? What's the point of being fixated on other people's business?
  
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5. Re:No! by ColdWetDog · 2013-09-13 10:57 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Hate to break it to you but people have put crummy old spinning rust hard drives in computers that have been all over the planet, in space and under water for some time. Yes, SSDs are preferred these days, but it's not like ruggedized computers just appeared four years ago.
  Hell, I remember field portables with FLOPPY DRIVES. And we liked them.
  
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  Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
6. Re:No! by Nethead · 2013-09-13 12:11 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  I just bought an old Toughbook about a month ago with only a floppy in it. See, there's this software to program the cabin lights on a 747 that runs only on 95 or earlier and needs to produce a single-sided 3.5" floppy to insert in the aircraft. We have teams that travel the world overseeing cabin upgrades and I got tired of trying to get old Dells to live long enough to last more than one trip.
  
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I am sure the "experts" are right... by MickyTheIdiot · 2013-09-13 07:52 · Score: 4, Insightful

....having a perfect track record and all.
1. Re:I am sure the "experts" are right... by interkin3tic · 2013-09-13 08:26 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Especially when saying something won't happen ever.
  
  "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." - Arthur C Clarke
2. Re:I am sure the "experts" are right... by PRMan · 2013-09-13 09:04 · Score: 2
  
  I remember them saying this about regular hard drives (at $1/MB). I remember 5 of us going together to get my buddy a 512 MB drive for $499 on Black Friday. We beat the experts prediction!
  Six months later, you could get one for $399, and by the next Christmas, for $199. So much for that prediction.
  I am guessing that this one will end similarly. Somebody will have a drive for .33/GB on Black Friday.
  
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  Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Depends on your definition of "soon" by IamTheRealMike · 2013-09-13 07:52 · 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.
10X my white and flabby ass by djupedal · 2013-09-13 07:56 · Score: 2

A 4TB hdd can be had for roughly USD$200, or less. A 4TB SDD is USD$29k.
1. Re:10X my white and flabby ass by TWiTfan · 2013-09-13 08:00 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Yeah, but Newegg will probably have it for $27K.
  
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2. Re:10X my white and flabby ass by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-13 08:14 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  Speaking of newegg you can get a samsung 1TB for $635. That's quite a ways below the $1 per GB price point.
3. Re:10X my white and flabby ass by Solandri · 2013-09-13 08:23 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  The spot price for NAND right now is about $5 for 8 GB (64 Gb). So 4 TB of NAND costs $2560. Which is pretty close to 10x the cost of a $200 4 TB hard drive.
  
  When you buy a 4 TB SSD, you're not paying $29k for the NAND. You're paying for someone to go through the trouble of amassing 4 TB of flash, design an arrangement with controllers which can address that huge amount, and produce it in bulk. Very few people are demanding that much capacity in an SSD, so the cost of that engineering and tooling work gets amortized over fewer customers. About $2.5k for the NAND, about $26.5k for the engineering and tooling.
  
  With the lower capacity SSDs, those production costs are amortized over much larger volumes, and a much greater fraction of the drive cost is the NAND. A 128 GB Crucial M4 drive contains $80 worth of NAND (actually probably a bit more since there's some overprovisioning to substitute for cells which die early), and sells for $100.
4. Re:10X my white and flabby ass by EvanED · 2013-09-13 08:32 · Score: 2
  
  SSD and HDD arent the same thing and are used for different but overlapping purposes. Comparing them directly is just plain ignorance.
  That's a dumb statement. To an enormous extent, SSDs and HDDs are used for different but overlapping purposes precisely because they have a very significant cost difference. In many cases -- almost certainly most cases -- the cost determines which you get (either directly or indirectly), so comparing the cost makes complete sense.
5. Re:10X my white and flabby ass by demonlapin · 2013-09-13 08:56 · Score: 2
  
  Exactly. If SSDs were as cheap as HDDs I sure wouldn't have any of the latter.
Crossbar by babymac · 2013-09-13 08:05 · Score: 2

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.

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"War makes me sad." - Me
1. Re:Crossbar by mlts · 2013-09-13 08:16 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  HP's memristor/ReRAM hasn't been mentioned in a while. That technology looks promising, and like the parent states, Crossbar has 1TB chips in testing. Does that mean there will be a USB flash drive with this technology? I'd not hold my breath, especially remembering how holographic storage was always just around the corner, from back in 1992 with a company called Tamarak to a few years ago with InPhase (well, their stuff is now owned by the state of Colorado, so who knows what state their IP is in...)
  However, SSD isn't the be-all and end-all in storage. One can always make an array using battery backed up DRAM if needed and had the cash.
Re:What a scam by afidel · 2013-09-13 08:19 · Score: 4, Insightful

Made by machines in $10B fab plants that need to be payed off before they are obsolete.

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BARRIER!? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-13 08:22 · Score: 5, Interesting

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
1. Re:BARRIER!? by Iniamyen · 2013-09-13 09:01 · Score: 2
  
  Being able to purchase a car with cash is a monetary barrier between lower and middle class?
  
  Really?
  
  You must be using your own definitions of those terms. Either that or you're talking about a pretty cheap car.
2. Re:BARRIER!? by ebh · 2013-09-13 09:16 · Score: 2
  
  I pay cash for my cars because of three things: 1. I don't buy extravagant cars; the last new ones were between $25K-$30K and the last used ones were half that; 2. As soon as I buy a car I start saving for the next one; 3. A windfall in the 1999-2000 dot-com boom gave me the initial large chunk of cash to start doing this (among other things).
  I could have done the same thing even if that windfall had never come, but it would have meant less money into my 401(k).
  All this presumed enough income that I actually could save some of it. Not everyone has that, many live paycheck-to-paycheck, and very few have enough to save for cars *and* max out their 401(k), and save for kids' college, and keep some money liquid, etc. I've been very fortunate.
Re:Exactly by oodaloop · 2013-09-13 08:24 · Score: 4, Funny

Because he doesn't want you to! He asked you nicely!

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Re:Better technologies out there by rubycodez · 2013-09-13 08:30 · Score: 2

That's because of the efficent use of bits by the kernel. All non-random stuff fed in gets further sorted to zeroes and ones, and the ones inverted to zeros. Those zeros are then fed out of /dev/zero, while the random stuff goes out /dev/urandom
Oh, thank goodness by forkazoo · 2013-09-13 08:31 · Score: 4, Funny

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.
Re:And by mark-t · 2013-09-13 08:48 · Score: 2

Careful there... you actually just might be right about some of those...

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But there's a limit to what you need there by default+luser · 2013-09-13 09:02 · Score: 3, Interesting

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

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Industry Disagrees by godamntheman · 2013-09-13 09:08 · Score: 2

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.
Re:What a scam by Valdrax · 2013-09-13 09:41 · Score: 2

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.

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Ignorant statement - NAND is going 3D NOW by mechtech256 · 2013-09-13 15:56 · Score: 2

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".