The road ahead

NAND flash offers an big development over tough drives, however it isn’t with out its very own drawbacks and challenges. drive capacities and price-in step with-gigabyte are predicted to continue to rise and fall respectively, but there’s little threat that SSDs will seize hard drives in rate-per-gigabyte. Shrinking technique nodes are a considerable challenge for NAND flash — whilst most hardware improves because the node shrinks, NAND turns into more fragile. facts retention instances and write overall performance are intrinsically lower for 20nm NAND than 40nm NAND, even supposing data density and general ability are vastly progressed.

So far, SSD manufacturers have added better performance by means of offering quicker facts requirements, greater bandwidth, and more channels per controller — plus the use of SLC caches we noted in advance. however, in the long run, it’s assumed that NAND will be replaced by means of some thing else.

What that some thing else will seem like continues to be open for debate. both magnetic RAM and segment alternate memory have supplied themselves as candidates, although each technologies are nonetheless in early tiers and have to triumph over good sized challenges to surely compete as a replacement to NAND. whether or not consumers might word the distinction is an open question. if you’ve upgraded from NAND to an SSD and then upgraded to a quicker SSD, you’re in all likelihood conscious that the space between HDDs and SSDs is a whole lot large than the SSD – SSD gap, even if upgrading from a relatively modest power. improving get right of entry to instances from milliseconds to microseconds topics a terrific deal, however improving them from microseconds to nanoseconds might fall under what human beings can realistically understand in maximum cases.