Why SSDs Won't Replace Hard Drives 315
storagedude writes "Flash drive capacities have been expanding dramatically in recent years, but this article says that's about to change, in part because of the limits of current lithography technology. Meanwhile, disk drive densities will continue to grow, which the author says will mean many years before solid state drives replace hard drives — if they ever do. From the article: 'The bottom line is that there are limits to how small things can get with current technology. Flash densities are going to have data density growth problems, just as other storage technologies have had over the last 30 years. This should surprise no one. And the lithography problem for flash doesn't end there. Jeff Layton, Enterprise Technologist for HPC at Dell, notes that as lithography gets smaller, NAND has more and more troubles — the voltages don't decrease, so the probability of causing an accidental data corruption of a neighboring NAND goes up. "So at some point, you just can't reduce the size and hope to not have data corruption," notes Layton.'"
Selective evolution (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, there's NO way that SSD technology will somehow evolve further than it has till now. It's after all SEVERAL years old by now!
Re:Selective evolution (Score:5, Interesting)
It is kind of funny how the article seems to be non-inflammatory, saying that replacement won't happen "soon", but the headline reads like a nice troll. Anyone think the editor chose the headline for page hits?
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...though OTOH it didn't point out that the delay will be likely due to Microsoft; which it should.
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All you need to do to blow out the storage capacity of SSDs is a video camera. If you are persistent enough, even a still camera is enough.
People are more than capable of creating their own stuff in sufficient bulk to render SSD unusable.
This isn't even getting into media that's purchased or pirated.
OTOH, most consumers are content to be led around by the nose by the sorts of companies that tend to under-equip their media devices.
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Look, I've got a 250 GB SSD and a one terabyte rotating platter hard drive on my 3 year old MacBook Pro. I'm one happy camper. The SSD makes the MBP fly along - not nearly as fast as my MacPro but so much more responsive than any laptop I've used before. The big, albiet relatively slow HD holds most of my still photos, and enough video to keep me entertained for mont
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We can already see that in the high-end market. Most of the developers I know who have switched to SSDs say they'll never go back. Compile times, boot speed of virtual machines, SSDs have changed their lives.
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Reminds me of Montgomery Burns' prediction .... (Score:3, Funny)
If will be a long time before development of the horseless carriage will overtake the technology of my steam-powered ornithopter!
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SSD devices have been around since the 50's and in production forms since the mid 70's. its not that the technology is immature, its that the technology is not cost effective for the vast majority of end users. there are serious issues that have yet to be fully addressed with SSD, and im not just talking about wear leveling and reduced performance as the devices fill.
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Cost is huge. What other issues do you see? The capacity limitations are more a function of cost than technology. They seem to crush magnetics in every performance benchmark imaginable. They last longer, use less power, and seem have very high data integrity.
I know you can only flip each bit so many times, effectively guaranteeing that an SSD won't last forever, but even with frequent reading/writing they still last for 5+ years which is more than can be said of your typical magnetic drive. In my experie
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Re:Selective evolution (Score:4, Informative)
SSDs already do things now that HDDs could never do - like provide sufficient capacity, I/Os per second and low enough latency to satisfy the I/O needs of a maxed out virtual host with internal storage, or a virtual host for VDI. In a next-gen SAN like the WhipTail they beat $1/IOPS, which is necessary for making VDI cost effective. They do it with a power to IOPS ratio that's so superior it's not even directly comparable, in a form factor that's like comparing a toaster to a refrigerator.
Performance against spinning rust was beat off the line. Storage capacity is almost beat already (400GB SFF SSD, 1TB LFF), and the only reason it isn't flat beat is because the engineers rebel against storage media that's capable of oversaturating its connection bandwidth by such a large factor - they CAN put that many chips in that box but the idea is offensive. The only issue left of the big three is price. Prices of SSDs are coming down faster than HDD prices so the trend is clear. SSDs will replace spinning drives on more and more applications. You can plot an intersect if you want - I'm pretty sure that against enterprise spinning disk the intersect is less than the five years out stated in the article. SSD is the new tape.
And that's without considering those impossible technological evolutions explored in your post and elsewhere in the thread.
Re:Selective evolution (Score:5, Informative)
I'm in agreement with this except holographic storage has a few major drawbacks. Although SSD is steller for smaller storage requirements, platter drives are just too slow to be of much more use. Some highlights for holographic storage that should be pointed out first:
The theoretical limits for the storage density of this technique is approximately several tens of Terabytes (1 terabyte = 1024 gigabytes) per cubic centimeter
Another factor: photographic media has the longest proven lifespan - over a century - of any modern media. Since there’s no physical contact you can read the media millions of times with no degradation.
Unfortunately, the current limitations make this a far off product that probably won't see the light of day for many years.
The initial prototype was only capable of 20 MB/sec. Although this isn't horrible for optical storage, it's hardly a top performer
Although the theoretical limits are almost infinite, the reality of the prototypes were only about 300 MB. They have already fallen behind platter based storage.
Seek times were in the area of 200 ms, which is also pretty poor compared to platter storage.
With all of that said, there have been viable advances in holographic storage. HVD's (Holographic Versatile Disc) show true promise.
Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc [wikipedia.org]
There are always more axes of improvement... (Score:4, Interesting)
With SSDs, I'm sure there is always another axis of improvement, similar to with CPUs, when you hit a wall with them, go SMP. When SMP doesn't scale, crank up the clock speed, etc.
What I wonder is what can be focused on to make SSDs be able to store more. We can always stick more chips in an enclosure, and the cooling needs for SSDs are far less than the cooling needed for CPUs.
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Newer solid state memory technologies. If you can get something more durable and faster than NAND at the lithographies we're headed towards, you'll be able to expand capacity without having to jam tons of extra chips in for bad block swapouts and having to pack killer levels of ECC.
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Exactly. Since the form factor isn't dependent on a disk shape, it might be better to go with a form factor that is better for SSD. Perhaps cubic, with a riser card holding the banks of flash chips connected to the controller which does the ECC, encryption, wear levelling, and other stuff?
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Such "Full-height" devices are essentially extinct(if anything, more servers are going with 2.5 inch drives, for zippiness, with 3.5s in the SAN if you need bulk storage); but their descendants are still "half-height"...
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If you want to put them in laptops then you either have to make them fit in the standard laptop drive form factor or convince laptop manufacturers to redesign thier product line to fit your device.
Besides a cubiod package seems like quite a nice form factor to design electronics for, just stack a load of boards that are all the same size and shape. What would you suggest instead?
Afaict the real problem at the moment is cost not ability to pack the parts into a given package. You can get a 512GB SSD in the 2
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Yeah, my first thought with SSD was additional parallelism and such. It seems pretty obvious not only to improve capacity but to improve speed as well. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
Who knows what the real intention of this article may be, but as far as I am concerned, "SSD" isn't ready enough yet. It's nice, but the ones that perform well are ridiculously pricey and the ones that are somewhat affordable are ridiculously slow. It's simply a deterrent for me at the moment.
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SSDs already leverage extreme parallelism via 15+ different channels, indeed they have to due to how slow most NAND chips (especially MLC) are. Eventually you're forced to the PCIe bus, especially as you approach 18-25 channels (FusionIO) and the SATA bus becomes a bottleneck.
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We might end up with two types of SSD, or even drives with both:
MLC's descendant would be designed for space and shoveling as much data into a drive as possible. Because of this, it would require large amounts of error correction. Because MLC is sometimes less reliable than SLC, it will take more processing power to encode incoming data effectively and safely.
SLC's descendant would be designed for speed.
As time goes on, operating systems will get intelligent enough to figure out what parts of a volume are
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Several SAN vendors do similar things right now.. either manually or some automatically, moving older, less frequently used data from fast SCSI and Fiber Channel drives to slower SATA drives.. last I looked, they were looking to add SSD's to the mix as well, either replacing SCSI, or as a very top tier.
Re:There are always more axes of improvement... (Score:4, Interesting)
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With hard disks, you can add another platter for more space, or make the diameter bigger.
More platters = manufacturing costs that scale will above linear for obvious mechanical alignment problems. You can drop back to linear scaling obviously by purchasing multiple drives and raiding them. But not so obviously there are serious controller cost and power supply cost limits, pushing you over linear yet again.
As for diameter, that kills power consumption, boot up inrush current draw, various gyroscopic effect problems resulting in expensive platters and bearings, and obviously seek time is kille
Not every PC is a traditional tower (Score:3, Insightful)
if you're building a new one, it shouldn't be much of a bother to fit a physically bigger drive inside your case.
Unless I'm building a laptop, or an all-in-one, or a slim PC to put next to the TV, etc. Not every PC is a traditional tower.
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A quick calculation, comparing the volume of the highest capacity flash memory I could easily find (16 Gb microSDHC) vs the volume of the highest capacity hard drive (2 TB) shows that the microSDHC has a Gb/volume ratio 18 times higher than the hard drive. Of course you couldn't just pack a case with a few hundred microSDHC chips and have it work, but even assuming half the space could be filled with flash memory, leaving space for controller card, data/power connections, cooling, etc. you would still have
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Storage Space isn't always the limiting factor...
Storage Size has been growing faster then our ability to fill it.
I Remember back in them good old days where I filled up Hard Drives quite easily. My old 80 Meg drive when it was new, could be filled up rather quickly.
Now that we have terabytes drives it is getting less of a factor to fill it up. Combined with the fact that network speeds are getting faster our need for storage is being limited. Sure RMS Followers thing that Cloud SaaS solutions will doom
Can't they just use more chips? (Score:2)
Obvious, I know, but can't they just make the chips cheaper then use more of them?
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Or we reach good enough.
How much storage do we really need on device?
First of all flash has replaced Hard Drives below a certain size. I doubt that you can find a sub 50 GB hard drive these days. If you do they are pretty rare and the price per gigabyte will be really high.
A lot of people don't need a lot more than 32 GBs of storage.
If you are storing video 32 GBs is a huge amount of storage.
When and if cloud storage and mobile broadband connections get cheap enough, reliable enough and with universal cove
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Or we reach good enough.
How much storage do we really need on device?
I agree with your overall premise, but I have to disagree with one of your points.
If you are storing video 32 GBs is a huge amount of storage.
1 hour of analog TV on Tivo's medium quality setting is 1.2g. An average DVD (not HD) movie runs about 5.5g. Throw in OS, software, and miscellaneous other things and 32g can be pretty small when video storage is required.
But on that same note, do we really need every device to have the capacity of
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I think that they would do better to just combine it with platter technology, for the obvious reason, but also because SSDs and flash storage were never, ever meant for mass storage.
Mass storage is a drive, disk, or tape, which by itself contains only the data plus a little logic for overhead--head seeks, reads, and writes. However, flash memory is logic-intensive; every single bit of storage is part of a circuit. That's never going to scale to the same degree. With HDDs, you, what, make the controls a l
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What I see happening is the HSM idea brought back, but done by a drive's firmware.
The first level would be either fast DRAM and used purely as a cache.
The second level would be SLC flash with TRIM done in hardware so the translation table doesn't get full over time, or the drive has 2-3 times as much flash so it can move data to another space, zero out the old space and have a translation table ready to go. This is where a VM swap file would live, as well as /boot or the kernel.
The third level would be MLC
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3D lithography?
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Just bought WD 64GB SSD (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Just bought WD 64GB SSD (Score:4, Funny)
You couldn't leave her (it) if you tried?
Re:Just bought WD 64GB SSD (Score:5, Funny)
I thought 10s boots were only true in fairy tales,
Meant for someone else, but not for me.
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lol epic win (:
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As recent consumers SSDs go, the WD 64GB is very, very average; if you try some of the faster, larger SSDs, say one based on Sandforce SF-1200 controller or even a latter-day Indilinx, that have higher random IOPs, going back to disk is unbearably slow for any operation that isn't cached in RAM.
Lets wait and see (Score:5, Insightful)
While the reasoning is interesting, and valid for all I know, why are we trying to say some bit of technology isn't going to work out ever? What's the point? Either it won't work out and that will be something the market will handle independent of whether you foresaw it or not, or a solution will be found and you'll just be wrong.
I'm reminded of an Arthur C. Clarke quote: "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."
Re:Lets wait and see (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, but have you forgotten Isaac Asimov's corollary?
"When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion -- the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right".
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So its future technology that will enable this to happen - but on HDD, because they are currently cheaper. How can that be valid reasoning?
Correct. (Score:5, Insightful)
The bottom line is that there are limits to how small things can get with current technology.
They're right, SSDs won't replace hard drives with the current technology. If only we had a way to improve technology over time!
Compare not next year's SSDs to today's HDDs (Score:3, Insightful)
If only we had a way to improve technology over time!
Compare not next year's SSDs to today's HDDs; instead compare next year's SSDs to next year's HDDs. If both SSDs and HDDs improve at the same rate over time, HDDs will keep their lead compared to SSDs for any application that isn't handheld, vibration-sensitive, or seek-heavy.
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The thing is, general computing seems to be seek-heavy. My HD is by far the worst performing component of my system, always laggy and grinding, unresponsive when busy. The memory sits their with huge chunks unused and processor idle. Storage needs to improve speed drastically, and SSDs give us that now, and seem to have more headroom in the future.
Sure they won't "replace" them (Score:2)
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I'm a moderate gamer, I work and do other stuff so I only play about 10-15 hours a week, and my Steam cache alone is 146GB, almost the size of my last hard drive. I don't even have all my games downloaded, and I have a fair few not on Steam as well.
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> When it comes down to it, speed it much more important than having 2 TB of stuff on there
Speed actually means NOTHING here. The marginal speed gain from SSD simply isn't worthwhile to most people.
At best, it might be useful when copying from one really-big-drive to another really-big-drive. Your desktop system is disk bound, someone (probably Microsoft) is doing something terribly wrong.
Although improved reliability has some value. Although most people won't care. OTOH, you can get increased reliabilit
Expanding drives (Score:3, Insightful)
Like I said, the only place where I can see the large capacities being needed is behind the scenes on a server or similar device, in which case hard disks aren't much of a problem. On consumer computers, I'm pretty sure they're going to catch on.
Re:Expanding drives (Score:4, Insightful)
You sound like me when I got my first 250MB drive. Shit! This will last me forever!
And it would have if I had kept running DOS.
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But as technology advances, more and more uses reach the point where further improvements don't add anything.
Back when people were using a 386 with 4MB RAM, computer specs mattered even to the average person. The average joe could find that something basic like word processing could run slowly or not at all, and things like having a math coprocessor mattered for office tasks.
These days if somebody asks you what kind of computer you recommend for email and word processing you can tell them that it pretty muc
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Back then I didn't have much trouble imagining things the PC couldn't do. I remember when it was an achievement for a PC to be able to play an MP3. Today my PC manages to play back full HD movies, where exactly could it go from there? The most space consuming thing I produce - unlike anything I can download off a torrent - is the videos I make, like when me and a friend went mountain hiking earlier this summer. Even that in 1080p60 (28 Mbit H.264) is only about 32GB per 2.5 hours. And since I try not to bor
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How far does the storage capacity really need to expand? Hard drives are in the terabyte range now, but not many people really use that much.
I have 500GB of games from Steam alone, and some of the recent games I've bought there took up 15+GB.
No matter how much disk space you have, someone will find a way to fill it up. The new low-end Red camera, if it's ever released, is supposed to record gigabytes per minute, for example.
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Obviously you don't have a camcorder and kids. Want to take pictures of their birthday? Snap of a bunch of pics, record them blowing out the cake, dad making burgers on the grill, mom doing dishes, kids jumping in the pool etc etc etc... all in 1080p... that'll eat up HD space in no time.
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Sure, 50GB may do for you, but you're boring. If you were a photographer, graphic artist, or musician, owned a camcorder, had a music or video collection in current formats, downloaded porn, had to do powerpoi
Re:Expanding drives (Score:4, Interesting)
The most interesting man I never met lived in a small house near the beach, had newspapers and old chairs and magazines piled to the ceiling in every room. Must have had a thousand cubic feet of Life Magazine. A most exciting fellow. What the man could have done with a proper warehouse, who knows?
What will finally put Seagate out of business is the universal porn compressor: an algorithm to produce almost any image with a pornographic payload (validated through fMRI studies). Finally we can eliminate women from sex. It'll be great.
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Something tells me by your post that you don't really need to worry about eliminating women from your sex life, I'm pretty sure they do that naturally do to instinct when you get too close.
Creepy is just as effective at eliminating women from your sex life as anything science can produce.
Re:Expanding drives (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, but you already can't store significant scientific datasets on consumer-grade equipment. Nobody's saying that hard drives will cease to exist, but it's quite possible that SSDs will displace them in consumer-grade machines, the kind normal people buy.
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Yup exactly.
Consumer computers are coming with 300 GB drives now.
Who the hell is going to use that? I mean, we Slashdot geeks do because we download disk images and rip DVDs and all sorts of things like that, but Joe Average who uses his computer to stream Netflix, browse the web and write e-mails will never use up even 100 GB of disk space. Even if he's got a digital camera, that's quite a lot of home movies.
Further, on a modern consumer computer, the hard drive is responsible for a significant fraction of
Why solid science reports won't replace churnalism (Score:5, Funny)
Not just density (Score:3, Insightful)
It's economic feasability, too. Rotating media is roughly $100/terabyte, it's gonna take more than one breakthrough for SSD to come close to that.
Nifty new technology doesn't get bought because it's nifty-new, it gets bought because it fills the need better than its predecessor for the price.
And YES there are plenty of applications where multiple terabytes are necessary, maybe not on your home system.
In case you're wondering, I have both on my system: / is SSD, /home is multi-terabyte RAID. Rotating mechanical media is sticking around at least for now.
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the desktop market drove HDD purchases far beyond LTO
Really? Where can I buy a 1.4TB hard drive that can read/write at 140MB/s for under $100? Yes, you can hot-swap hard drives; what's the rated insert/remove life of the connector (on the drive and whatever you are connecting it to)? What about the temperature, humidity, and shock rating? How about the storage shelf life and error rate?
Desktop hard drives have slightly passed LTO in terms of capacity, but that's the only area. That's not really all that new, either; a single current-generation tape hasn'
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Really? Where can I buy a 1.4TB hard drive that can read/write at 140MB/s for under $100?
You are asking the wrong question.
Instead, how about "Summing up all of the worlds digital data, is more stored on platters, or tape?"
Or maybe, "In 2010-converted dollars, how much money has been spent on platters vs tape?"
Or how about "Will Google ever use tape?"
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"about a decade ago."
I'm not talking about decades. I'm talking about today, tomorrow, next week, next year.
Maybe you missed the part where I said "for now".
So let's get some hybrids then! (Score:3, Informative)
This is what annoys me is that it seems like Flash is idea as a cache for magnetic HDDs. The same principle is already at work in our CPUs:
So a modern CPU is way faster than modern RAM. The access times are much lower. How then, can we have a system not hamstrung by RAM? The answer is cache. With a good system of high speed L1/L2 (and sometimes L3 cache) we can have our cake and eat it too. You have a few megabytes of expensive high clock SRAM right on the core. You have a few gigabytes of cheap DRAM clocke
Solid state densities (Score:5, Insightful)
I know, someone's gonna lecture me on how this isn't at all a fair comparison...
Limitations aren't the tech of the NAND chips... (Score:4, Insightful)
To wit, who honestly has a larger than 1TB disk inside their machine right now? I'd imagine not terribly many, as a percentage of all computer owners. Indeed at home I have twin 700-ish GB Caviar Blacks in a RAID 1 configuration, of which I'm using maybe 30% of their capacity.
TFA doesn't actually make any arguments about price directly. It indirectly suggests price of the drives is related to lithography resolution, but provides nothing to back that up.
It seems to me that over time as yields on current technology increase and fab costs are recouped, the price of current technology will go down.
So if we can make a 1TB disk today, it'll be the same 1TB disk in a year or two, except less expensive, probably faster, and probably more reliable.
Re:Limitations aren't the tech of the NAND chips.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Correct me if I'm wrong here - and I usually am wrong -
I'm usually right... but that statement might be one of the exceptions. :)
TFA doesn't actually make any arguments about price directly. It indirectly suggests price of the drives is related to lithography resolution, but provides nothing to back that up.
It seems to me that over time as yields on current technology increase and fab costs are recouped, the price of current technology will go down.
It's a basic maxim of the silicon industry that cost is directly proportional to die area. To simplify, you can consider the silicon fab to have a fixed cost per wafer. Therefore the more die fit on a wafer, the cheaper each chip becomes. The two main ways to do this are by reducing the amount of functionality on each chip (undesirable when the goal is to increase capacity), or to move to a smaller lithography so you can fit many more die on a wafer. While new lithography generations have frequently allowed greater performance, even if they don't they are deployed anyway because it reduces cost for the manufacturer.
Yield improvements and paying off R&D both will help cost, but only to a limited extent. Yields for a production lithography should already be quite high and will asymptotically approach 1. Once R&D is payed off the cost will drop, but there still remains a very large fixed cost per wafer. Neither is going to come close to the cost benefit of being able to, say, go from a 45nm to 32nm process and get roughly 40% more die per wafer.
So yeah price will come down for other reasons, but in the long term price reductions in flash memory devices are going to depend on using smaller lithographies just like it does for other semiconductor devices. The author probably just didn't think to explain this aspect of it, since it's such a well-known aspect of the silicon industry.
On the other hand, people were saying that CMOS processes used in CPUs were going to reach fundamental limits 20 years ago. And 15. And 10. And 5. And oh sure, some of those limits were reached, but then clever people worked around them. The statement in the article amounts to "We can't just blindly reduce lithography size without changing anything else indefinitely", which is true but also kinda pointless since the people working on smaller lithographies for flash are probably aware. In the end exponential progressions like this can't last for ever, but I'm not about to tell the process engineers that they aren't going to be able to find enough tricks to keep it going long enough.
It's possible. (Score:2)
replace hardrives WHERE (Score:3, Insightful)
Some context would be nice. It may be that SSDs end up replacing conventional hard drives on, say, all laptops. Or all personal desktops that don't also double as servers. Or we may see a two-tier situation develop where SSDs are used for day-to-day operations in the enterprise and hard drives used for storing backups, or storing infrequently accessed archival data.
I predict (Score:3, Insightful)
Is physical size really the problem? (Score:2, Interesting)
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MicroSD also goes to 32 GB.
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Seek time? You're also forgetting the controller electronics too.
if you think 16TB is enough for the average home user you either severely overestimate or underestimate homeusers.
i don't know which, actually.
They always say this! (Score:2)
They always say this, and we always find something.
Check out this article about hard drive density i just found from 2001:
http://www.post-gazette.com/healthscience/20011029disk1029p2.asp [post-gazette.com]
"...within two or three years, advances in storage capacity will begin to taper off, he predicted."
Drives were about $300 for 80GB back then... Last weekend i bought a 2TB drive for $125.
Yeah, we will always find something. These articles about "zomg technology is going to END!" need to stop.
-Taylor
There has been breakthroughs in voltage (Score:3, Interesting)
SSD for Performance (Score:2)
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"I suspect SSDs will fill their own space in the market with mechanical HDs being reduced to storage or backup drives."
What else do hard drives do, again? Did you mean 'reduced to purposes where either capacity or lengevity are more important than speed or silence'?
You'll have to be more specific. Virtually every hard drive I've ever owned have been used for either storage or backup. Holding the OS is also a storage purpose, but you can figure that many drives need to hold an OS to be part of a useful sy
This makes total sense. (Score:2)
As I can attest to while I read it on my CRT monitor.
Price per GB (or TB) will always win out (Score:2)
Where's the SSD Pixie Dust? (Score:2)
Hello? IBM? Anyone?
Data density is not necessarily the point (Score:2)
As network bandwidth continues to grow, mass storage in central servers or clouds becomes more feasible. A netbook with even 8-16GB of SSD space not only gets more life out of its battery; it can also take more of a beating and access its data faster.
Different media fulfill different purposes: SSD is more expensive and less dense, but it's also faster - that's how the pyramid of storage media is arranged.
Flash based SSDs maybe, but what about others? (Score:2)
Flash based SSDs won't be able to out compete conventional hard drives at large storage, but what about others? HP is working on memristor based storage, devices which need to be nanoscale to function.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor [wikipedia.org]
Flash is so 2000s (Score:3, Informative)
The hot new solid state non-volatile memory technologies are phase-change memory (PRAM), memristors, ferroelectric RAM, resistive RAM.
Some of these technologies are much more area-efficient than Flash, and will stack in pseudo-3D chips reasonably well (memristors in particular should stack in full 3-D arrays very efficiently...).
The general observation that disks have the lead right now is true, but the other technologies close a lot of the gap, and the growth curves look very similar after that. Who knows if it ever gets cheap enough to completely replace disks in our lifetimes, but there is hope of seeing that.
That does entirely change the game on system architecture. Disks are slow and far away from the CPU. Solid state memory can be as close or nearly as close as DRAM, and if it doesn't require a lot of handholding on lifecycle management (wear rates etc - Flash is horrible here) then can be used and managed as a simple byte or block array rather than the whole "filesystem" crap we now use. We still may want POSIX like abstractions for parts of storage management, but life is so much easier if the back end store is just a block array we read/write than if it's really a spinning disk, behind a cache, behind a controller, behind a SATA/SAS bus, behind a controller, behind a PCI bus, behind a southbridge, ....
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64G is only fine if you use your system like a web terminal.
Otherwise, your own creations or just a few games from EA will quickly fill up that drive.
64G is a middling mp3 collection.
Re: (Score:2)
Yet a 64GB collection of MP3, assuming the average filesize is 6MB and each song costs $1, it's worth $10923. Protect your laptops, people!
Re:Do we always need more space ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Do we always need more space ? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with "online" storage is that you can end up offline.
When that happens, the fact that my phone can hold my entire music collection is a handy thing.
It always amazes me when people talk about the cloud as if all of the necessary network infastructure was already there. It's not. Mobile networking is CRAP and mobile networking providers seem intent on also making it EXPENSIVE too.
It's the cloud that sucks. SSDs have potential. Their main problem is that they're terribly expensive. They are not likely to overtake spinny disks any time soon because of this.
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"Sure classical HDD will soon reach 5TB but do we need always more space ?"
Yes. Games are between 15-25GB today and getting larger, that's roughly 5 Games per 100GB. The amount of video content both raw (DVD/Blu-ray) and compressed is growing in size as higher resolutions become available. As storage grows applications eventually take advantage.
Do you always need faster audio/video storage? (Score:2)
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Welcome back 5½ drives. We all have missed you! I have never understanded the idea to make smaller HD's when there have been need to bigger storage space.
5 1/4 drives will be good for SSDs in some scenarios, but 5 1/4 drives don't fit well in rack-mount architecture unless you're planning on using a multi-U machine. Also, 5 1/4 spindle drives were never that great because they couldn't spin fast enough (and be gyroscopically safe).