SSD technology is doomed

Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
Quote:

SSDs Have Bleak Future, Says Researchers

February 17, 2012 by Kevin Parrish - source: Computerworld



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."



[...]



Whole article here.



So if 2024 is the event horizon for SSD technology. Then we'd better get a move on developing the next paradigm! We'll need it, in full working order with all teething problems dealt with, by 2024!

But TBH I don't see a glimmer of a realistic next memory storage paradigm anywhere! What would it have to be? Quantum computing is still decades off.
«1

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 31
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,310moderator
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by AlvarezLuis View Post


    So if 2024 is the event horizon for SSD technology. Then we'd better get a move on developing the next paradigm!



    At 6.5nm, it says capacities will go to 4TB. This presumably is in a 2.5" enclosure. That's the maximum for 3.5" platter drives right now. It also says the latencies only doubled. Read/write latencies are in the order of milliseconds and you can bet the engineers building them will find solutions to any of the problems along the way. Even if we have to stop at 1-2TB, it doesn't matter, only the price matters. They can already fit 512GB onto a card that is small enough to go in a Macbook Air:



    http://www.anandtech.com/show/4606/s...2gb-capacities



    Intel is planning to have their SSDs up to 800GB this year.
  • Reply 2 of 31
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Marvin View Post


    the latencies only doubled.



    "Only" doubled? Do you have any idea how that exponentially increases read/write errors on a 4TB drive into the zillions?
  • Reply 3 of 31
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by AlvarezLuis View Post


    "Only" doubled? Do you have any idea how that exponentially increases read/write errors on a 4TB drive into the zillions?



    Your implication is that tech won't change between now and then, and I don't buy that. Eventually we'll have different types of solid state storage than NAND, and many of the concerns with modern drives won't even exist anymore.
  • Reply 4 of 31
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Tallest Skil View Post


    Your implication is that tech won't change between now and then, and I don't buy that. Eventually we'll have different types of solid state storage than NAND, and many of the concerns with modern drives won't even exist anymore.



    Yeah, and you probably believe in the bible too.



    SSD technology was conceived in the mid-seventies. So it took 30+ years to develop into a (little bit) commercially viable proposition (it's still faaar too expensive for a great breakthrough). Today we have no viable next generation mass storage technology concept, and only 12 years until we really need it commercially viable and available for the mass markets...
  • Reply 5 of 31
    sunilramansunilraman Posts: 8,133member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by AlvarezLuis View Post


    Yeah, and you probably believe in the bible too.



    SSD technology was conceived in the mid-seventies. So it took 30+ years to develop into a (little bit) commercially viable proposition (it's still faaar too expensive for a great breakthrough). Today we have no viable next generation mass storage technology concept, and only 12 years until we really need it commercially viable and available for the mass markets...



    Cloud.



    By 2022 we should be close to most areas having 500mbit/sec connections. (Edit: removed wrong calculations)



    Even now at home with a measly 15mbit/sec connection I literally don't have to store any iTunes Store videos locally. I choose it and it streams faster than realtime on Mac and iOS devices.
  • Reply 6 of 31
    sunilramansunilraman Posts: 8,133member
    My estimates are very low ball, this paper http://www.campustechnologies.net/pd..._paper_CTI.pdf estimates that by just 2017, the OECD ~average~ bandwidth will be almost 800mbit/sec. That is much faster than most ~hard disks~ in 2012 (when comparing to real world transfer rates).



    Steve Jobs predicted this 15 years ago, whereby with network caching everything becomes faster than hitting the disk drive for data:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yE3Ta_NK4-I



    So yes, SSD is doomed, but not because of physical constraints.



    By 2020 getting something over the network will be faster than reading it from a 7200rpm hard disk in 2012. Along with the compression you can do with CPU/GPUs in 2020, as well as new network technologies... Well, the rest is, as they say... history.



    Regular hard disks are certainly doomed for mainstream portable computing by 2016:

    http://www.supremelaw.org/systems/io....annotated.PNG



    Even with my 15mbit/sec various tasks on my laptop with my 7200rpm drive, the Internet is waiting for me, not the other way 'round. Just got an SSD, amazing stuff. And there's a decent solid 10 years of SSD tech to make local storage incredibly fast, so along with the cloud we should see a convergence around 2022 whereby network and local storage is fully optimised on both sides, by no doubt Apple and maybe some other players, who knows.



    Actually, that convergence could be around 2016, it's happening real fast now. By 2022 it could be that most servers will use highly optimised RAID-etc. SSDs (as they are increasingly used now) and most data for client devices will be streamed. Again, smart caching, insane compression (imagine by 2022, a BluRay-quality video could easily be 100MB) and network engineering will make all this possible.
  • Reply 7 of 31
    hirohiro Posts: 2,663member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by AlvarezLuis View Post


    "Only" doubled? Do you have any idea how that exponentially increases read/write errors on a 4TB drive into the zillions?



    That statement is so technically wrong the only thing I can say is that there is nothing redeeming in it at all. Period.





    Quote:
    Originally Posted by AlvarezLuis View Post


    Yeah, and you probably believe in the bible too.



    SSD technology was conceived in the mid-seventies. So it took 30+ years to develop into a (little bit) commercially viable proposition (it's still faaar too expensive for a great breakthrough). Today we have no viable next generation mass storage technology concept, and only 12 years until we really need it commercially viable and available for the mass markets...



    The only redeeming part of that post is that NAND flash work started in the 70's. Wow, magnetic tape storage started in the 1920's and is still viable today for the right applications.



    You are just a very good Chicken Little simulator. One who obviously hasn't been paying ANY attention to the upcoming technologies in computing over the past 5-10 years. And also a Chicken Little who is completely forgetting about the end of line for computing because we have already run into (oops passed anyway) the first two un-passable physics limitation Moore's Law walls.



    Tech is all about S-curves. You can count on that both in the META and in the micro. Just because a micro S-curve curve shows an approximate future limitation date doesn't mean the META S-curve made out of a succeeding family of those micro S-curves will hit it's hard limit too.
  • Reply 8 of 31
    hirohiro Posts: 2,663member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Marvin View Post


    At 6.5nm, it says capacities will go to 4TB. This presumably is in a 2.5" enclosure. That's the maximum for 3.5" platter drives right now. It also says the latencies only doubled. Read/write latencies are in the order of milliseconds and you can bet the engineers building them will find solutions to any of the problems along the way. Even if we have to stop at 1-2TB, it doesn't matter, only the price matters. They can already fit 512GB onto a card that is small enough to go in a Macbook Air:



    http://www.anandtech.com/show/4606/s...2gb-capacities



    Intel is planning to have their SSDs up to 800GB this year.



    SSD latencies are currently about 50 microseconds. That's about 100x faster than the average rotating hard drive, so a worst case slowdown of 2x still makes for a solution that is 50x faster than what everyone finds acceptable today for secondary storage.



    Capacities will continue growing, what the grad student and other researchers forgot to say is that the deadline is only in the face of currently known manufacturing techniques. 2024 could be a problem if nobody works on these things, but I doubt that will be the case. They also forget that circuit density is only one aspect of device capacity. Packaging can be changed to put bigger dies into only slightly larger packages. That would require some re-plumbing of the on-die I/O, but there isn't any manufacturing limits on that. Those kind of shenanigans can add a generation or two of cheap extension time for alternative research. Wow, then todays problem is pushed to 2027-2030. That would give SSDs a market leading life about the same as CDs, hardly a thing to get all worked up about today.



    To boot, I think memristor arrays will be taking over by then, leap-frogging all the density, current and lifetime issues of flash memory arrays.
  • Reply 9 of 31
    hirohiro Posts: 2,663member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by sunilraman View Post


    Cloud. (2 posts )



    Cloud will have plenty of bandwidth. The problem is latency and that is what makes computing slow down. I don't think average cloud latencies will ever consistently be within an order of magnitude of local secondary storage latencies. 1-5ms latency is a wildly best case based on my data always being only a single router hop or two away on a lightly loaded server with the data already in RAM. More like 5+ms if the server has to pull my data from a drive array. put a whole bunch of customers on that server and watch average first byte delivered latencies rise even more.



    We need a new idea of a file system that can expand the virtual capacity of your local storage and handle predictively archiving things and parts of files to the cloud that don't need to be stored locally to avoid the latency hits. Kind of keep the short latency required stuff locally and handle the rest/remainder as streams. We have a ways to go, both technically and trust-wise, to get to the place this can work generally. I think Apple is maybe trying parts of these techniques in their cloud streaming of media.
  • Reply 10 of 31
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by AlvarezLuis



    Yeah, and you probably believe in the bible too.



    SSD technology was conceived in the mid-seventies. So it took 30+ years to develop into a (little bit) commercially viable proposition (it's still faaar too expensive for a great breakthrough). Today we have no viable next generation mass storage technology concept, and only 12 years until we really need it commercially viable and available for the mass markets...



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by sunilraman View Post


    Cloud.



    And then somebody else on the other side of the world, whom you don't know, will determine your access to your data. And bleed you dry for that access. You won't own your own data anymore.
  • Reply 11 of 31
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by AlvarezLuis View Post


    And then somebody else on the other side of the world, whom you don't know, will determine your access to your data. And bleed you dry for that access. You won't own your own data anymore.



    While I share your sentiment here (and some of your concern), I don't agree with your overarching implication (being that the only means by which anyone should be storing data in the future is local, spinning disk hard drives).
  • Reply 12 of 31
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Tallest Skil View Post


    While I share your sentiment here (and some of your concern), I don't agree with your overarching implication (being that the only means by which anyone should be storing data in the future is local, spinning disk hard drives).



    That is not my "overarching implication"! I couldn't care less about which technology is applied to store my data. As long as it is not controlled by someone else BUT me!

    That is not the case with cloud storage. Cloud storage operators can cut us off of our own data at the drop of a hat! And demand anything they bloody well please to reconnect us again. With cloud computing we're setting ourselves up for cosmic scale blackmail.
  • Reply 13 of 31
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by AlvarezLuis View Post


    I couldn't care less about which technology is applied to store my data.



    You seem to care a lot about not using SSDs, though?



    Quote:

    Cloud storage operators can cut us off of our own data at the drop of a hat! And demand anything they bloody well please to reconnect us again. With cloud computing we're setting ourselves up for cosmic scale blackmail.



    That's what lawsuits and governmental protection are for. Yeah, we'll see cloud services slowly grow to extortionate prices, but when there are free alternatives, they'll be artificially forced downward.
  • Reply 14 of 31
    Dream on: there won't be any 'free alternatives' as 'they' are (trying to) sueing those out of existence with ACTA, SOPA, PIPA, etc. etc.
  • Reply 15 of 31
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by AlvarezLuis View Post


    Dream on: there won't be any 'free alternatives' as 'they' are (trying to) sueing those out of existence with ACTA, SOPA, PIPA, etc. etc.



    iCloud's going to be sued? Huh. Maybe Apple shouldn't have done it, then.
  • Reply 16 of 31
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Tallest Skil View Post


    iCloud's going to be sued? Huh. Maybe Apple shouldn't have done it, then.



    No, Apple('s iCloud) is going to be doing the sueing (together with Amazon, Microsoft, and other big cloud operators; i.o.w. a kartel!) of your 'free alternatives' (read: competition) to drum them out of business, using ACTA-, SOPA-, and PIPA-like constructs. And then they, that kartel, can blackmail us (you and me) for access to our own data!
  • Reply 17 of 31
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by AlvarezLuis View Post


    No, Apple('s iCloud) is going to be doing the sueing (together with Amazon, Microsoft, and other big cloud operators; i.o.w. a kartel!) of your 'free alternatives' (read: competition) to drum them out of business, using ACTA-, SOPA-, and PIPA-like constructs. And then they, that kartel, can blackmail us (you and me) for access to our own data!



    You need to stop making your hats out of metal. iCloud is free. It is one of the free alternatives to Carbonite and that jazz.



    I'd ask what makes you think what you've said up there is anywhere near the truth, and I'd ask why you think cartel is spelled with a 'k', but it's obvious you've some paranoia issues.



    Oh, never mind. Maybe you're Dutch and this is some big electoral push I don't understand.
  • Reply 18 of 31
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Tallest Skil View Post


    iCloud is free.



    Yes, as free as your first few coke snorts

    But once you've got your data up there, have come to rely on it, and the 'free alternatives' are sued out of existence you will pay through the nose.

    (Like with coke... ).
  • Reply 19 of 31
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by AlvarezLuis View Post


    Yes, as free as your first few coke snorts

    But once you've got your data up there, have come to rely on it, and the 'free alternatives' are sued out of existence you will pay through the nose.

    (Like with coke... ).



    And so what's your evidence of any of this happening ever?



    iTools: Always free, never paid

    .Mac: Always paid

    MobileMe: Always paid

    iCloud: Free



    History tells us that it will remain free in perpetuity. If they want people to keep using it at all, they'll make it free forever. Period. It's illegal to one day start charging for something, holding one's data hostage, and since they'd have to give advance notice, you'd be able to remove all your files before the dreaded cut-off date. It's a non-issue.
  • Reply 20 of 31
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Tallest Skil View Post


    It's illegal



    That's never stopped big corporations. So they get their lobbyists, their Congressmen, and their Senators to change the law. Or they simply stop the free iCloud service, citing whatever excuse is convenient, and launch a new and improved, but paid "iStorage Pro" service, to which they will transfer all your data for free (aren't they nice?) and without any hassles IF you opt-in. If you don't you'll have to shell out for a (couple of) big SSD(s) or HD(s), and download your 10 Petabytes of data to it/them.



    It's an old scenario.

    Every drug dealer uses it.
Sign In or Register to comment.