SSDs Have Bleak Future, Says Researchers

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[citation][nom]4745454b[/nom]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?[/citation]

Now that you mention it... I was wanting all these things 12 years ago... not exactly the way they came out in reality... but pretty darn close =)
 
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.
 
As far as "Efficient computing" is concerned SSDs really speeds up the rendering\previewing process
of any multi threaded multimedia application running on any operating systems, particularly Windows.
Those who are engaged into developing and designing digital content for broadcast, advertising and
cinemas, SSDs makes their content creation more faster resulting in better and on time project
deliverables.

With regards to data latency, data errors and circuitry as chips gets smaller and smaller, We dont
have to worry about these as new and reliable technology being put in SSDs now gets better in time
thus further increasing its reliability.

Those SSD manufactures ARE VERY WELL AWARE of those above mentioned issues and, as far as
circuitry is concerned, SSD manufacturers have proper measures and tools to maintain the reliability
of the chips and circuitry they are using no matter the size as long as it passes good and strict quality
control WHERE, their SSDs can be use by consumers that lasts as longs as hard drive's life span or
even longer and eliminating data error issues along the way.

Two years from, SSD's price will be more affordable than ever and the technology and innovation
behind it gets even better too thus giving us the freedom to buy what ever capacity we want with hi
reliability thus making our computing experience much faster, better and easier.

- Technology and time is on our side...
 
I didn't have a problem with this article. It was a bit like researchers pointing out 10 years ago that hdd manufacturers couldn't just keep speeding up the spindle speed to get better performance. There were some people who thought that eventually we would see hdds spinning at 50K rpm but when scientists pointed out that the physics didn't make that practical, other alternatives got all the attention.

SSD manufacturers can't just keep reducing the circuit size, they have to find innovative ways to get more and more capacity without sacrificing performance.
 
[citation][nom]shin0bi272[/nom]LOL actually.... I do have an LTO2 drive for music backup purposes[/citation]

Yeah, I have a tape drive in one of my machines too; but it's getting harder to find blank tapes.

 
[citation][nom]stingstang[/nom]You left out that tape drives from back in the 1990s still have more capacity than most HDD's today. If a company wanted to, it could have kept innovating that type of data storage, and we'd all have tapes in our computers. The world just went a different way..[/citation]

Actually you'd be hard pressed to find tapes from those days that go beyond a TB.
And of course it is linear storage; a total deal breaker if you are in any kind of a hurry 🙂

 
[citation][nom]didgetmaster[/nom]I....SSD manufacturers can't just keep reducing the circuit size, they have to find innovative ways to get more and more capacity without sacrificing performance.[/citation]

Layering them on top of each other; just like layered motherboards.
3D is the hot item in the movies... let's make SSDs 3D as well.
We call 'em SSCs as in Solid State Cube (ah, yes, let me patent that idea) 🙂



 
Not to worry, things change and evolve. 2024 is 12 years from now on, we might be moving to a whole new technology better than SSD just like we moved from HDDs to SSDs (or rather, "we are moving").

Just look back 12 years, we did not even have IE6 back then. Now we have IE6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 on the way and things have changed radically. I expect to see performant and big drives in 2024 😉
 
They are most likely correct. Around that time something like multi-bit phase change memory will be a suitable replacement to NAND. I don't see why someone needs to research this as IBM, Intel, and Samsung are already working on research for this very issue that will appear 10+ years down the road. Heck Samsung and IBM already have working PCM chips. In ten years SSD's will likely be used for storage liike good ole HDD's are today and some variant of phase change memory will replace RAM and primary OS drive(Will be nice to have non-volatile RAM).
 
[citation][nom]CaedenV[/nom]@ articleThis is just dumb.[/citation]
You can say that again.

IMHO, it is dumber still to be teaching "researchers" to produce this type of "research."

Perhaps this student is a "marketing major." :)
 
"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."

With 10-12, 16TB drives on ONE tower, who needs a NAS?
 
Wow... how shortsighted is this... Obviously the writers/research group hasn't heard ANYTHING about the newest path RAM is expected to go down. Something akin to a nano wire which operates at extreme frequencies AND is non-volatile, which should quite readilly eradicate the aging NAND flash SLC/MLC as it matures.
 
I see SSD's becoming a staple in every system even if they don't increase in capacity. Smaller 'netbook' type systems will use them as primary storage and higher capability systems will use them as boot drives. The performance advantages will justify a two drive implementation.

Some laptops in the 15inch and above range are already being released with two drive bays for this reason.
 
one thing which i think the SSD manufactures will do for a 1TB drive is 2 500GB boards in the same case as in the same concept as a HDD with many platters sure it is not innovation but it is doubled the size without that much speed lost if any speed lost between them.
With that i am with all the ppl saying that 12 years down the road in computers is like a life time for the computer world and we will probably not even still be using the x86 instruction set but something which is better with both 32-bit, 64-bit and 128-bit computers as i think 128-bit computers will be coming out by then if it keeps going on in the way which it is with the amount of RAM which we fit into a single machine.
Also with SSDs i do not see them lasting for to long before replaced not due to speed but due to there is already something in the works to replace it which hopefully will be faster and at least a little bigger. But with this what happens when we do hit a physical and logical wall in technology that just cannot be passed? Will we stop or will we put more resources towards a different aspect of the hard drive to make it go faster even though the surface of it stays the same?
They did not take that part into account with the current SSD controllers yeah the bigger the space the longer it takes but controllers evolve and hopefully improve to better be able to do so.
And now for responses to other ppl.
@freggo They didn't stop evolving tape drives as they are still around just not used that much if at all in consumer computers and only as a back up medium for servers because of them being so slow but so big compared to a hard drive that the server can back up all its hard drives onto a single tape instead of having to buy multiple hard drives to do the same thing
@tmk221 thats the point of most if not all of the responses
@ whoever said that putting the SSD onto the motherboard will be a thing of the future. A integrated boot hard drive concept is an ideal from the '80s when you had very little room on it like 8kB or something and could fit your entire life onto only that much room but of course now i would be happy if i can fit a word processor file into that insanely small amount of room as just the disk allocation space is 4kb now adays. Also they are trying to push for smaller motherboards with which if you integrate a SSD into the motherboard your will effectively take it from being a mirco-ATX to being a ATX board or from being an ATX to being a EATX board without much extra functionality added in besides the small SSD unless you can get a very small SSD to fit and shove a cheap apple/windows/linux system onto it, which would rock but i doubt it as it will be a stagent drive which will only be able to be replaced with the entire motherboard driving up the cost of the piece of hardware making motherboards not one of the cheaper parts of a computer.
@drwho1 " With 10-12, 16TB drivers on ONE tower, who needs a NAS " well most NAS servers have a lot more than just a little 16TB amount of disk space also ussualy include RAID and still have a larger amount. Yes i know not all do but many mroe expenive ones do some even have over 1EX of disk space which i cannot think of any reason why a single company and/or person would need so much space unless they do not delete anything for a few years including DNS records and back-ups of servers.
@nebun it doesn't translate to RAM chips because of the material used in a CPU is a different alloy then used in a RAM chip the end that's the reason also in CPUs are changing materials because they can't get any faster on the same one but with a change they can so in that all the SSDs will have to do is the same thing most likely and change what they are using to make the chips to go faster with more disk space.
 
As long as SSDs get about 200MB/s read/write, it'll be fine with me. But I really wish somebody to release PCI-E 3.0 x16 RAM drive with 8 or 16 DDR3 slots. This would be awesome for uncompressed video processing 🙂
 
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