SSD Prices In A Free Fall?

Solid State Drives have become the standard for computing in the last few years. With the prices of solid-state drives expected to reach parity with hard-disk drives next year, are HDDs doomed? SSD Prices In A Free Fall article tells that the hard-disk drive vendors point to the higher price of solid-state drives as a reason to keep on buying hard drives, but as Bob Dylan sang, “The Times They Are a -Changin’.” In 2014, prices for high-end consumer SSDs dropped below enterprise-class HDD.

The advent of 3D NAND has become a game-changer for the storage industry by increasing SSD capacity and dropping SSD prices. 3D NAND is a fresh way of getting out of the NAND scaling trap. By packing 32 or 64 times the capacity per die, 3D NAND will allow SSDs to increase capacity well beyond hard drive sizes. SanDisk, for example, plans 8 TB drives this year, and 16 TB drives in 2016. The result of the density increase is clear: This year, SSDs will nearly catch up to HDD in capacity as hard drives appear to be stuck at 10 TB capacity. So it is possible that SSDs will surpass HDDs in capacity in 2016. Capacity-wise Micron mentioned that 50TB SSDs were feasible in the future. Server flash DIMMs could also benefit.

So what about SSD price points? A terabyte SSD can be had for around $300. Moreover, this is before 3D NAND begins to further cut pricesSSD Prices In A Free Fall article expects that by the end of 2016, it’s a safe bet that price parity will be close, if not already achieved, between consumer SSDs and the bulk SATA drives. Or is that so? There is no doubt that 3D NAND will lead to bigger solid state drives, but it may not shave costs. One of the issues with producing 3D NAND chips is that they’re more complex than planar chips by a significant margin.

3D NAND will lead to bigger solid state drives, but it may not shave costs article says that the major brands have already planned over 18 billion dollars in spending to produce 3D NAND chips over the next few years (huge investment) as the four foundry operators will all be pumping out mass production volumes of the high-capacity stuff: Intel says its (and Micron’s) 3D NAND will be industry’s first disruptive 3D from a cost perspective in 2H2015 and SanDisk will have 3D NAND in 2H2015 that will be less expensive than its current flash technology. The forthcoming flash fab costs are driven by the conversion to 3D NAND which, although denser (meaning higher-capacity dies) than traditional 2D or planar NAND, is more difficult to make: While the previous generation of flash memory took only three or four deposition layers to build, 3D NAND takes between 120 and 144.
Chips are moving from planar 16nm MLC flash to 3D TLC flash using a 4X-3X process in order to achieve better access speed and endurance from the TLC cellsIn 2014, 3 per cent of the ~61 exabytes of flash produced was 3D NAND and SanDisk expects that 3D NAND will account for +50 per cent of industry wafer production by 2018.3D NAND chips will gradually become more popular until they pass planar construction in market share, but even through 2018 their supply may remain limited, and their cost will be high. The difference is huge, especially if expressed as the capex per TB for flash vs disk: flash costs between 162X and 53X more to make per TB than disk. The net effect here is that server flash capacity and all-flash array capacities should see a substantial jump in 2016, but it seems that 3D NAND isn’t going to immediately lead to big, cheap drives.

What this means to hard disk manufacturers? This will put pressure on hard-disk drive makers to lower prices, but the pressure might be somewhat less than SSD Prices In A Free Fall article expects. After-market HDD spares will continue to be sold, though upgrades and replacements will increasingly use SSDs, especially in servers. The volume reductions in HDDs will be seen during next few years.

How reliable flash storage is? Facebook SSD failure study pinpoints mid-life burnout rate trough article tells that Facebook engineers and Carnegie Mellon researchers have looked into SSD failure patterns in their study  and found surprising temperature and data contiguity results in the first large-scale SSD failure study. One finding was that SSDs do not fail at a steady rate over their life, instead having periods of higher and lower failures: Burnouts peak early, then fall, before increasing with age. Flash storage has limited lifetime, so you need to take account that:  it is necessary to measure data actually written to flash cells in an SSD rather than the data sent to the SSD by the host OS, because of wear reduction techniques and system level buffering.

 

2 Comments

  1. Tomi Engdahl says:

    From few years back but mostly still relevant:

    No, Solid-State Drives Are Not Going To Kill Off Hard Drives
    http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/08/02/no-solid-state-drives-are-not-going-to-kill-off-hard-drives/

    Myth #1: HDDs are based on dinosaur technology and will eventually be replaced by SSDs

    While HDD magnetic recording on spinning platters has been around for over 50 years, flash memory is also over 30 years old. SSDs and HDDs are often more complementary than competitive.

    Myth #2: Flash memory prices will fall faster than HDD prices and will one day be cheaper.

    Many people commonly believe that flash memory prices will decrease faster than HDD prices, but based on long-term industry roadmaps for flash memory and HDD, the average cost takedown for both SSD and HDD will likely be similar. The consequence is that their respective long-term pricing curves are likely parallel and will not cross.

    There are key challenges in reaching the resolution limits of lithography, scaling due to the high voltage required in the program/erase step and maintaining adequate data retention times with decreasing number of charges per cell.

    The scaling of bit cost ($/bit) in HDD comes from modest decreases in unit cost from generation to generation but with large increases in capacity. HDD capacities will likely scale to 10x their present capacities in the next 10 years. For larger capacity HDD’s, particularly those of interest for use in cloud storage, the bit costs are projected to reduce by about 25 percent compounded. This projected cost reduction rate is very similar to what may be expected for at least the next several years from flash memory.

    Myth #3: High performance HDDs in the Enterprise data center will disappear and be replaced by SSDs

    The performance of an enterprise-class SSD can be about 100x higher for random read/write operations compared to an HDD. The challenge for SSDs, though, is the cost per bit is higher by at least 10x compared to HDDs.

    Summary

    Flash memory and HDD magnetic recording are synergistic technologies. Demand for digital data storage continues to grow at greater than 40 percent annual rate, in part due to the new applications enabled by flash memory. However, just as flash memory has helped create new demand for HDD storage capacity

    Reply
  2. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Samsung stuffs 2 TERABYTES into a single flash drive
    Wham, bam, thank you, NAND
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/07/samsung_2tb_hard_drive/

    Samsung has brought out a pair of mighty 2TB solid-state drive (SSD) internal drives aimed at the consumer market.

    The South Korean electronics giant said its 850 SSD PRO and EVO hard drives pack 2TB of capacity in a 2.5in hard-drive enclosure. Each drive contains 32 128Gb Samsung V-NAND chips as well as four 4GB DRAM chips.

    Samsung has long touted the 3D V-NAND chips as a more scalable and power-efficient alternative to previous flash storage methods.

    A 2TB capacity had been previously reported as possible, should users ask for one. Samsung said that, indeed, users had clamored for more storage space in the EVO and PRO SSD lines.

    “Samsung experienced surge in demand for 500 gigabyte (GB) and higher capacity SSDs with the introduction of our V-NAND SSDs,” said Samsung memory senior vice president of branded product marketing Un-Soo Kim.

    “The release of the 2TB SSD is a strong driver into the era of multi-terabyte SSD solutions.”

    The 2TB 850 PRO costs $999 and carries a 10-year, 300TB-written warranty

    Reply

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