Thanks to Samsung’s 1000-layer NAND technology, 1000 TB SSDs could become commonplace by 2030.

Although it’s not clear whether these will be actual products on the shelves, products shipped to customers (like Teamgroup), or samples from their labs. In any case, the prospect of having an SSD with 1000 NAND layers is especially attractive at a time when many storage technologies (hard drives, silicon, tape, DNA, etc.) are trying to replace support as the world’s hottest property. bits and bytes.

The best hard drives, also known as HDDs, are reliable, have a large capacity, and are generally cheaper than an SSD (Solid State Drive) of the same capacity. However, even the worst SSD will outperform the best HDD in terms of file transfer speeds and overall performance, simply because of the technology used, the best SSD will definitely burn the best HDD out there.

In our environment, boot disks do more than run storage servers: they also store log files and temporary files produced by the storage server. Each day, the boot drive will read, write, and delete files based on the activity on the storage server. In our first storage servers, we only used hard drives for boot. We started using these SSDs in the fourth quarter of 2018. Since then, all new storage servers and HDD boot drives have been equipped with SSDs.

Backblaze, a backup and cloud storage company, has released data comparing the long-term reliability of solid-state storage drives and traditional spinning hard drives in its data center. Based on data collected since the company began using SSDs as boot drives in late 2018, Backblaze cloud storage evangelist Andy Klein released a report yesterday showing that the company’s SSDs fail at a lower rate than hard drives as drives age.

The findings come from Backblaze’s latest report detailing the reliability statistics of the drives used in its infrastructure, and is the second such report focusing on SSDs since the company published a report in March.

SK Hynix and Micron have announced that they will release 238- and 232-layer products in early 2022, respectively, which will significantly reduce the cost per terabyte for solid-state hard drives on paper. However, it should be noted that these probabilities may be flexible depending on global supply and demand. The current global economic situation may force companies to reduce R&D activities and extend the intervals between product releases.

The average price of SSDs is at an all-time low, with 2TB SSDs widely available for under $100. Experts expect SSDs and HDDs to reach parity in some capacities by next year, with the currently lucrative enterprise market the only one or less immune at this point.

“By introducing a 238-layer product based on SK hynix 4D NAND technologies, SK hynix has secured world-leading competitiveness in terms of price, performance and quality,” said Jungdal Choi, head of NAND development at SK hynix. Contrary to expectations, the new 238-layer NAND will appear in consumer devices for the first time, which will excite content creators and PC gamers. Only then will the new chip come to smartphones and high-capacity servers.

Regarding Micron’s specific plans for the new 232-layer 3D NAND device, Scott DeBoer, the company’s executive vice president of technology, said: “We have optimized the technology based on what we need to make the world’s fastest gre NAND and SSD products for data centers and customers. .The combination of both internal and external controllers has been a strong part of our move towards vertical product integration to ensure that we are optimizing the NAND technology and controllers needed to deliver the products’ future leadership.

Micron said it is already working closely with industry partners to ensure Layer 232 devices are properly supported and is accelerating the development of new drivers based on this technology. To fairly compare SSDs and HDDs, Backblaze controlled for the average age of the two groups, so SSDs that were an average year old were compared to HDDs that were an average year old, and so on. The graph below shows the results up to the second quarter of 2021, taking into account the average age of the two groups.

SSDs equipped with new 3D NAND flash are expected to hit the market in 2023. With Samsung, more layers mean not only cheaper products, but also higher memory density. Currently, the largest SSD in the world is the 3.5-inch 100 TB model from Nimbus Data, which uses a 64-layer MLC chip. A 1024-layer TLC/QLC chip will have 16 times more layers, which puts a 1PB (1000TB) SSD within the realm of possibility by the end of this decade. “We believe it is possible to expand this design space with granular drives in the 4 Tb/in2 to 6 Tb/in2 range, and then plan to add one-size-fits-all patterns using custom granular drives,” said Seagate CTO John Morris. .

We believe this will be a springboard to unlock the 5 7 Tb/in2 range for media. Then we’ll move to fully structured media to achieve 8 TB/2 and greater densities. With the CAGR space density just presented, we have the opportunity to reach 10 TB per disk by 2030. So this represents our forecast for technological limitations for the next 10-15 years. But who needs such an ability? Cloud storage companies like iDrive or BackBlaze, hyperscalers like Google or Microsoft, social networks like Instagram or Facebook.

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According to a 5-year reliability study by Backblaze, SSDs are more reliable over the long term than HDDs.

BigFAT, a free and open FAT extension, is backwards compatible for unlimited file size, the theoretical limit for exFAT, a custom file system developed by Microsoft, is 2^64 bytes.