Hopefully This Will Drive SSD Prices Down

[r_manic]

Intel Corp. and Micron Technology Inc. on Monday plan to announce the world's first 25-nanometer NAND flash technology, which will make it possible to double the storage capacity of devices like smartphones, music and media players, and solid-state drives (SSD) without making the products themselves any bigger.

Intel is currently shipping samples to equipment manufacturers of an 8GB NAND die created with its latest lithography. Lithography is the process of creating cells and transistors in silicon, which are used to store bits of data. The smaller they are, the more that can fit on a single NAND flash chip -- and the greater the storage capacity.

The companies plan to begin mass production of the 8GB die next quarter.

Source

 

[Pailin]

yeah, I saw an article yesterday somewhere about these too. Sorry, no link - was an accidental find while doing a Lot of searching for something else.

they said these were coming in Q4 for public availability

So lets see

I can't resist any longer, think I am going to have to buy something sooner

 

[outlw6669]

I thought this was quite impressive from Anand's Announcment.

Getting close to the wall here :lol:

 

[Pailin]

Nice one, thanks for that link - kinda puts things in perspective for me

Still think I am going for a RealSSD C300 sold by Crucial early(?) this month to tide me over a while ~_^

 

[randomizer]

This will reduce NAND cell lifespans significantly (although percentage-wise, less than the transition to 34nm), so I wonder how they're going to combat that.

 

[sminlal]

I suspect this will end up requiring expanded error correcting codes and more "spare" cells to deal with the shorter-lifespan issue - if so then the price of drives built with these new chips won't go down quite as much as their expanded capacity would suggest.

 

[randomizer]

Intel claims speed increases but more error-checking is going to hurt performance as well.

 

[sminlal]

ECC doesn't really add much overhead. Hard drives, flash drives, and optical discs are already heavily dependent on it in order to ensure data integrity despite the need to store and then extract a signal from an inherently noisy medium.

Don't forget that it's used on the links as well - both ends of a SATA connection (and USB and Firewire and Ethernet, etc. etc.) generate and check ECC to make sure there's no corruption of information travelling over the link.