SSDs Have Bleak Future, Says Researchers

truly yours,

THAILAND HDD manufacturers

2024? Our SSD's are still good for 12 years..

They will find a way. LCDs are supposed to suck, and look at all the tom-foolery LCD manufacturers have gone through to make them compete with Plasma and CRT.

Should I worry about the sun's collapse ?
Double the latencies when on 4 TB capacity ? that's still in the microseconds range...
Mechanical disks need to rely on caches (try disabling the disk's cache on device properties in windows, and see), and it's completely impossible to go beyond milliseconds (head's weight - movement speed - strength are related to materials we have, and discovering such a material (that could make possible to go beyond ms) would change our whole lives (but not for having better HDD, we would have better cars, planes...).
SDD based on nand flash, memristors or whatever else are here to stay. I agree in some scenarios HDDs still perform best... but the trend will be towards SSDs: because (to make SSDs) you don't need to master another completely different technology (to make HDDs), because it's hard to fit an HDD into a SoC...

The term SSD could be applied to any solid-state memory based storage device, not just NAND flash based ones. It seems shortsighted to claim the doom of SSDs based on the short comings of one memory type. What about PCM, ReRAM and STT-RAM based SSD's?

"The automobile is only a fad, but the horse is forever."

In the future we will likely see a hybrid approach, with a small SSD (possibly directly socketed into the mobo) for the OS and a few common apps. This will be invisible to the user, just as RAM is invisible to them now. The first chipset to really pioneer this approach will gain an advantage over the competition, and you can bet they are already working on it. The Z68 was the first step, next there will be a socket on the mobo for a small NAND hard drive with the OS pre-installed and some extra room. The BIOS will know that when this boot drive is detected to boot from it rather than a traditional HDD, and the OS will know to keep it hidden from the user.

Pure speculation from an "expert." I think it is rather annoying that there is a lot of obvious things "discovered" by "scientific" researchers these days, and it somehow passes as newsworthy.

What cannot be seen at this point is all the improvements in the technology that real researchers are working on and will continue to develop to overcome all the problems cited by this "expert." I am sure that real researchers are aware of the problems pointed out by this "expert," and are already looking for solutions.

By the time that 2024 comes along, who knows what form mass storage will have.

An interesting article but 12 years from now is a long time in the computer world. It could very well be that something new completely replaces SSDs. I would actually be surprised that something doesn't replace it.

Come on Tom, this is a silly article. Assuming the problems increase with no technology increase other than stumbling along the shrinking die path; to illustrate a cloudy future for SSDs? Really? On so many levels this is absurd.

Sometimes I wonder, desktop HDD are not limited to power consumption, but why arent the HDD manufacturer push 10K RPM HDD down to mainstream to "slow the SSD" adoption . Surely the latency gap would have improved significantly, 8.9ms vs 4.0 seek time. It may not reach the SSD ones, but it is still better to delay the SSD getting into mainstream. While many of us like the capacity of HDD, but we I would prefer having slighly smaller 500GB with boost speed over the 2TB ones. The size of the mainstream SSD are still less than 64GB, win7 64bit takes up almost half of it, so the leave not much room for games/other thing.

Those that can do, those that can't teach.

This is mostly true. I've heard such issues with new NAND processes from a memory expert.
However, there are many competitors with next-gen solid state storage. By the time NAND's dominance within SSD is over, there will be bigger, better, and faster SSDs, just not using NAND.

1984... bought my first hard drive.
5 1/4 inch, full height ( that's like 2 regular size CD-ROM drives on top of each other).
Cost... 2 weeks pay.
Capacity unformated : 5MB

Tape drive manufacturers made it clear that this technology will never replace the massive amounts of storage provided by tapes.

Anyone have a tape drive in their computer ?

Double the latency and SSDs will still be much faster than HDDs, but you don't see them saying that those are not a viable technology.

Pure speculation. I’m sure there would be issues if hardware manufacturers continued to do everything the same way 12 years from now as they do today. Thankfully these technologies and engineering in general are evolutionary processes that change during product development. This "study" is like saying you can't run a Pentium 1 at 1 GHz. You sure as heck can. You’re going to need to change your cooling system from air cooling to an exotic system but none the less it can be done. In 12 years we may not be using traditional semi-conductors in SSDs for memory at all. There is the possibility of crystalline memory mediums such as quarts replacing our current technology just as conventional hard drives have replaced magnetic tape. To say SSDs are doomed is just silly.

"They predicted that read/write latency will double in MLC flash and increase more than 2.5 times for TLC flash."
So instead of .1 ms of latency, we're going to have .2, or even .25 ms?! This is TERRIBLE news! What ever are we going to do?
Go to a different menufactoring process with different materials... We've known this forever.

first of all this is a report from a graduate student so you can just ignore it right there. Secondly there were scientists that said we'd never break the sound barrier because as speed increased the air resistance would increase and prevent you from being able to go any faster. Lastly its from a graduate student from univ. of cauleeforneah

Oh P.S.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/30 [...] r-than-fl/

Farthermore I'm sure we've heard this kind of talk all the time about similar and other things. Can't go above 1GHz, can't go above 640kB, can't go above 4GBs of ram, etc. There are always plenty of can't and shouldn't people out there. 2024? Serious? Any idea of what we will develop between now and then? Think of it this way, what did we use for computers 12 years ago back in the year 2000? Did you ever think we would have 4 and 8 core CPUs with 24GBs of ram, 3TB hdds, and the ability to use 3 GTX580 class GPUs together? Care to guess what we will have 12 years from now?

Simplistic extrapolation of a limited number of current and past Flash devices is nonsense, not even worthy of a grad student. Will manufacturers produce terabyte Flash devices that are slower than mere 100-gigabyte Flash (or some rival non-volatile solid-state storage technology) devices? Of course, because their will be a huge market for it. Simultaneously, will manufacturers produce ever-faster Flash (or equivalent) devices at "mere" 100-gigabyte capacities? Of course, because there will be a huge market for that too. The ancient phonograph-style technology of HDD (rotating media, moving pickup arm) will soon join the paper-tape reader in the museum of ancient computer technology.

Wait... wha? They're keeping "costs in check" on SSD? I thought they just charged whatever people were grudgingly able to scrape together. I've heard this whole "the technology is doomed" argument before... They've been saying this about standard magnetic hard drive every generation since the early 90s.

@TomFREAK
The reason 10K drives do not do well in the consumer market is not due to the performance or price increase, it is due to the noise. In a world where your 7200RPM drive is the loudest part of most computers, a 10K drive just screams. If they managed to make a quiet 10K drive people would be all over them.

@stingstang
Every medium has its strong and weak points. Tape was great for storage, but not pratical for throughput, and god help you on a 4K random seek time test lol. So we moved to HDDs sacrificing size for performance, but HDDs as you may remember were not going to be viable due to heat issues. We wee 'never' going to see HDDs over 500MB, then 10GB, then 200GB, and the last I heard was 500GB, while we now have 4TB drives and are awaiting the release of 6TB drives. Now we repeat, sacrificing size for performance (though with the new R4 16TB drive one has to question the size sacrifice ) moving from HDDs to SSDs. At some point we will do yet another transition to something more like low power system ram that is constantly powered by an internal source, or perhaps the Star Trek crystal medium. But every technology hits a wall, at which point we move to a different medium.

@ article
This is just dumb.

I am not sure about this article. I mean the way technology develops is that they identify limitations and come up with solutions to solve those problems. This does not take that into account. It just assumed the same tech at high capacities. Does not make much sense.

It looks like researchers never heard of System Mechanic 11.7 . SSD Optimizer ^_^.

Spinning disks and buggy whips are teh future.

yawwn...
as though, SSD's of the future will use today's technology such as flash.