SSDs Have Bleak Future, Says Researchers

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Write endurance decreases as cell size decreases.
The smaller the cell size reduces ability to pass voltage and current required for sense and amplification ready for transmitting to off-chip controller. This means that the page access and load into read array is slower. Too high/fast and the cell looses the ability to be completely full or completely empty with the extremes heading towards the middle. High current pushes electrons into the surrounding material and accumulation will change the behaviour of the cell and may alter the state of neighbouring cells. Very high voltage/currents will cook the cell and destroy any reuse.

Ways around limits.
1) There will be alternative materials used compared to todays silicon which could allow for a redesign for better life/speed.
2) Write endurance increases if you reduce the erase/rewrite voltages but this means the cycle takes longer (similar to setting microwave oven on
 
.. gt 50% to defrost and time increases but it defrosts better than frying the outside while the middle is still frozen). Background erase/write while other dies/pages are accessed to hide latency.
3) increase parallelism where the data read/write is spread over more channels and dies in each package (more layers of dies stacked in single package). Bad for small read/write but better for large sequential. More capacity.
4) The wear leveling algorithms check the min and max states and adjusts the sense thresholds according to the deterioration (might have to be same thresholds for all). It then uses this information to use the bad cells less and the good cells more to even out the wear.
 
Not to mention that as the densities increase they can add more "banks" and "channels" in parallel to increase the bandwidth and somewhat mitigate the increases in latency. There are probably many other ways they'll come up with as well to make SSDs stay in the market and eventually replace mechanical drives in most places.
I could possibly see mechanical drives becoming the tape drives of the world in 20 years or so. Much slower and only used for offline backups. With of course the improvement over tape that they can be randomly accessed.
 
[citation][nom]ap3x[/nom]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.[/citation]

At the same time, we can't always assume that those limitations will (or even should be) overcome. Flash simply may not be a good long term solution to put effort into -- electronics history is absolutely littered with the corpses of technologies that became outperformed, obsolete, or forced into niche roles.

2024 is ages away. 12 years ago, flash was just barely coming onto the market itself in sizes like 32MB and 64MB. A decade+ is plenty of time to develop a new, better technology to replace it, such as racetrack memory (which is theoretically both faster and more dense than flash). Flash may still find use in portable devices since it requires less current to run, but I don't have any problem imagining that it won't be used long term for desktops.
 
[citation][nom]freggo[/nom]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 : 5MBTape 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 ?[/citation]
Too bad one can thumb-up past 20...well said
 
I'm fairly sure that many companies still use tape drives as data storage options (stuff they have to store for legal reasons, etc).
 
Think back 12 years and replace SSD with Zip Drive in this article and have yourself a good chuckle. "Because my cooch is locked up tighter than an ancient undiscovered crypt, I stacked 14 Zip Drives on top of each other with electrical tape and they simply weren't as fast, staying with 1.44MB floppy for now. Apple Apple Apple"
 
Many people are saying "What would you expect from a graduate student", like being a graduate student is something bad. I don't understand the negative connotations in relation to being a grad student, could someone please elaborate?
 
Well guess what, people said write endurance will shrink bellow tolerable level at around 28nm and cause to many errors to be reliable. Have it? No the products evolves both in hardware and firmware, error correction have become way better,write amplification have improved significantly and have resulted in still very reliable even when that threshold is passed!

What is worrying is the write endurance on the future nand's as they shrink. If it can't be improved that is where the ssd's price/size improvements will stop. As write endurance drops the spare area needs to be larger and larger and in the end eat up the gains from the shrink process. Not latency or some of the garbage "i want to market myself" arguments up there!
 
Have these "scientists" ever heard of parallel processing ? Data can be processed easily from multiple sources, just split the storage area into multiple smaller ones and have a controller for each storage area.
SSDs can never reach the latencies and errors that a mechanical HDD can get.
 
Wow I actually think I lost some intelligence I'll never get back reading that story.
 
a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego.
Click to expand...

Oh a graduate student. Well, she must be right. You know, with those 30 years of experience in the technology field and all. I'm sure she has read enough books to know how real world companies and markets adapt to emerging trends and scientific advancements.

/sarcasm off
 
Its another fad like Apple's Firewire which was supposed to be so great. People make huge trade offs with SSD's just to gain a little read write speed over a decent Hard drive. If you notice, all of Apple's products that have switched over to SSD vs hard drives are significantly less in capacity but yet cost just as much.
No matter how you look at it, your getting less. Having used a Macbook Air for a few years. I have noticed that it does slow down. Of course the worst problem with Apple's ideal of SSD is that its not serviceable.
Just imagine what would happen if you tried to sell people smaller hard drives? Like a 128GB drive? Would you buy it? But you would buy a 128 gb SSD drive?
 
Hey Guys, in 1979 my first 4Kb of static ram cost me £80 pound notes in the UK took 5 volts at 5 amps to run it and got very hot with it's 25 watts of power consumption. I have always believed that with enough time and money all the technical issues can be solved and they usually are as long as the engineers and designers think outside the box. It is a shame that some so called researchers cannot see outside the box.

Cheers
www.wirralcam.com
 
Latency is one thing. Data errors is another. I hope when miniaturization reaches the threshold of data integrity that technology/consumers demand things are small enough. As a small-time freelance tech from 1991-2010, hard drive reliability deteriorated my last few years. Whether it's just QC/testing or the drive media or controller technologies themselves, I don't know. About the time 500 GB drives and higher density platters were in high demand (2007 in my case), I noticed a pronounced jump in drive failures across the board. From less than 1-2% up to 3-10% among branded and custom built computers that came in for service, or DOA or test failure counts of OEM drives purchased. My own upgrade this summer will be my first venture into SSD as primary drive. Hopefully, SSD doesn't go down the same path.
 
goes to show you that if god had meant man to fly he would have given him wings!
 
Its hard to believe but mechanical based hard drives have be around for over 20 years. Its a proven technology. It was a revolutionary leap forward for desktop computers. No longer did you need to keep stacks of disks/tapes around to run a computer.

As for the industry replacing it with is something new? Its going to take time. SSD drives offer a lot promises. Only time will tell.
 
çmon fellow readers this comes from a sponsored grad student that is unexperienced,short sighted and just want to have credits for her tesis.
 
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