Eyesight?
Am I seeing things or is this article a repeat word for word from a few days ago?
The arrival of a flash dead-end is being delayed by two technologies, both involving the number three – three-level cell (TLC) flash and three-dimensional (3D) flash – with the combination promising much higher flash chip capacities. As ever with semi-conductor technology, users want more data in the same space and faster …
Unlike a processor where size does matter, is it really that important for storage where the form factor is largely irrelevant?
Obviously it's cheaper to make chips at a smaller scale, but the cost of the Fabs is quite considerable.
Why not have say 5x500GB flash chips in a single 2.5" enclosure with say a RAID 5 controller built in.
That would give you a 2TB disk with some level of redundancy.
"is it really that important for storage where the form factor is largely irrelevant?"
Yes. MicroSD being a case in point.
FWIW there is a good deal of redundancy and error checking in SSDs. RAID5 would be regarded as sub-par (by a long shot) for good reason.
Cost.
If they could be churned out really cheaply at some lower density, then they could be spread out over a larger form factor (such as the 5.25inch drive size) and stacked vertically as lots of circuit boards.
(Which is what happened in the early days of RAM, and going back further, ferrite core memory).
I wonder who really needs hundreds of terabytes of flash? Won't most folks be happy when a good flash cache solution is available as a front-end to lots and lots of good old spinning rust?
Spinning rust is fine until you drop the laptop holding the device.
My laptop has 2TB of SSD. Most of it is for different VM's. now if there were 2TB drives rather than the 1TB ones (eg the Samsung EVO) than I could avoid lots of copying off to spinning rust USB drives.
"I wonder who really needs hundreds of terabytes of flash?"
*Puts hand up. I have over a Petabyte of planetary surface imaging for starters (only one planet, other planetary sets are almost as big)
Flash is _far_ more reliable than spinning rust(*). They _only_ reason we're not deploying all-flash is simply cost.
(*) Apart from the obvious stuff, mechanical issues are exacerbated by putting several hundred drives in close proximity. No matter how hard you try, headseek vibration gets transmitted between drives and degrades performance - and the more seeking that goes on, the shorter a drive's life.
'BY using this technology Intel anticipates a 10TB SSD coming in late 2016 early 2017.'
Nice if you can afford it, at the current rates it would cost around £3500 for 10 TB of SSD and that's consumer level stuff.
You can get 16TB of spinning rust for about £350 and spend the change on a nice controller and SSD or RAM cache.