Microsoft Says Today's Solid State Drives (SSDs) Are Doomed

[R0H1T]

Solid state drives were, and to some extent still are, considered the next best means of storing data, but Microsoft thinks this fame is undeserved and will eventually die down.

Microsoft believes that solid state drives will lose the speed advantage over hard drive units by 2024, effectively nullifying their primary marketing asset.

Likewise, the corporation drew attention to a rather worrisome factor in regards to the relationship between growing storage capacity and speed, not to mention data reliability.

Put simply, researchers have discovered that flash technology latency and data errors increased along with the drive size.

The devices became too unstable around the 16 TB capacity mark, which should be reached within five years or so.

Certainly, that is not exactly a short while, but it does make it sound as if hard drives are going to experience their second wind, especially if they become 100 times faster than they are now.

“While the growing capacity of SSDs and high [data access] rates will make them attractive in 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,” the researchers from University of California, San Diego and Microsoft Research say.

There does not seem to be any way to remove this problem, which means that IT companies, and product buyers, will have to settle for alternatives.

Fortunately, man is an inventive creature, and there are already potential replacements, like 3D memory, even if it may not have much to boast about now.

Furthermore, consumers may not have to deal with this problem at all, when the time comes, since most things will be stored in the cloud, making local HDDs and the like less relevant.

Nevertheless, drive capacities aren't growing for their own sake: file sizes have been getting larger as better video formats and more complex data routines and scripts have come to be. As such, NAND chips will be milked for all they are worth before the 16 TB limit is attained.

Source

[R0H1T]

Old news I guess but still pretty relevant for an SSD enthusiast !

[BluERaiN]

Well I guess that's how an SSD will turn out on a long run.

[bwop]

I've had my SSD for about four years now, which is longer than most modern hard drives seem to last!

[mara-]

LOL, they can dream that everything will be on cloud. I hate the damn cloud, I hope it will never fully succeed. On topic, we never have to use SSD for high capacity storage, just to boost speed with some applications.

Cheers ;)

[DKT27]

LOL, they can dream that everything will be on cloud. I hate the damn cloud, I hope it will never fully succeed. On topic, we never have to use SSD for high capacity storage, just to boost speed with some applications.

Cheers ;)

That's what the companies don't want. They want cloud and high capacity SSDs. They don't want to provide better storage capability and they don't want to concentrate on small-medium size SSD, improve it's quality and quantity (sales) and reduce the cost.