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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.
Yeah, but Newegg will probably have it for $27K.
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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.
Made by machines in $10B fab plants that need to be payed off before they are obsolete.
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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
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.
Because he doesn't want you to! He asked you nicely!
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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.
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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