SSDs Have Bleak Future, Says Researchers
SSDs are seemingly doomed. Why? Because as circuitry of NAND flash-based SSDs shrinks, densities increase. But that also means issues relating to read and write latency and data errors will increase as well.
"This makes the future of SSDs cloudy," states Laura Grupp, a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego. "While the growing capacity of SSDs and high IOP rates will make them attractive for many applications, the reduction in performance that is necessary to increase capacity while keeping costs in check may make it difficult for SSDs to scale as a viable technology for some applications."
To prove this theory, Grupp teamed up with Steven Swanson, director of UCSD's Non-Volatile Systems Laboratory, and John Davis of Microsoft Research. Using PCIe-based flash cards with a channel speed of 400 MBps based on the Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI) specification and a standard 96 NAND flash dies, they tested 45 different NAND flash chips from six different vendors that ranged in size from 72-nm to 25-nm.
The group discovered that write speed for pages in a flash block suffered "dramatic and predictable variations" in latency. Even more, the tests showed that as the NAND flash wore out, error rates varied widely between devices. Single-level cell NAND produced the best test results whereas multi-level cell and triple-level cell NAND produced less than spectacular results.
With the testing information at hand, the group fast-forwarded to the year 2024 when NAND flash circuitry is expected to be only 6.5-nm in size. They predicted that read/write latency will double in MLC flash and increase more than 2.5 times for TLC flash. Yet SSDs at that time are expected to feature capacities of 4 TB when using MLC flash, and 16 TB when using TLC flash.
"It's not going to be viable to go past 6.5-nm," Grupp said. "2024 is the end. [People] are used to working with technology that continues to just get better, but with NAND flash we're going to be facing trade-offs as it evolves."
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THAILAND HDD manufacturers
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 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...
THAILAND HDD manufacturers
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...
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.
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.
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.
It's even worse. "... states Laura Grupp, a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego. " She's a grad student!
That makes her words even less respectable in my eyes.
I recently bought myself and SSD for my laptop and after couple of days I would never go back to HDD. NEVER!
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 ?
Exactly. Who even knows how we are going to store data in 12y from now. They fast forwarded to 2024 like there was no innovations between 2012 and 2024...
And those that can't do either one spout moronic platitudes...
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.
Oh P.S.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/30/embargo-ibm-develops-instantaneous-memory-100x-faster-than-fl/