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Over the last decade SSDs have increased their storage capacity at an incredible rate. This growth has mostly been fueled by adapting better process technology
by Expez 12y ago
Over the last decade SSDs have increased their storage capacity at an incredible rate. This growth has mostly been fueled by adapting better process technology. I read a while back that the move to ever smaller scales (now 19nm) came at the costs of increased errors rates and that the limiting factor going forward would be error correction. Has this situation changed, or is SanDisk just throwing chips at the capacity problem, along with better controllers, and targeting an enterprise segment willing to pay the price?
- 31reasons 12y agoThen why the entry level Mac Book Air still has paltry 250 GB! I hope they catchup with the rest of the world soon.
- nixgeek 12y agoThese new drives from SanDisk are still over $1/GB in cost.
- kylec 12y agoThe entry level MacBook Airs (and retina MacBook Pros) only have 128GB SSDs. I get that Apple wants to keep the price down so they can keep their margins high, but it's a bit small for a primary computer in 2014.
- aroman 12y agoActually, it's more than enough for me, and I dualboot. Not everyone has the same usage habits :)
- leorocky 12y agoWhere do you store your pictures and home movies? A movie of an event is near 1GB in HD.
- mfisher87 12y agoSome people don't take pictures or videos. I take the occasional ephemeral photo of my dog doing something stupid. I have maybe 20 photos that I know of from the last year or two and they're all of stupid crap. On my phone. At least 25% of those photos are of my dog mid-yawn. Not kidding. However, I do have something like 6TB of active desktop storage (not including NAS) at capacity because of software, audio samples, disk images, virtual machines, backups, documentaries and shows, etc. Everyone just uses computers differently. My mom's storage is something like 2TB and I think about 70% of it is home movies and photos. The remaining 30% are duplicates of some of the same files, likely on the same disk in different directories.
- toomuchtodo 12y agoFlickr. 1TB for free (although I'm a grandfathered pro user at $25/year).
- aroman 12y agoI have a NAS with 3TB of RAID storage. When iCloud automatic backup complains that my phone is running low, I download the camera roll to there. If I'm making a home movie, I'll just copy the files to the SDD temporarily. I have 30GB+ free most of the time.
- selmnoo 12y agoYeah, you are unusual in my view. :) My mom, who barely uses the computer - and has a laptop, was able to get up to 200 GB within 6 months. How? Simple -- videos and pictures she takes of the kids from her smartphone, that she insists be saved and archived. That's my mom. I, on the other hand, am running out of free space on my 4TB capacity desktop, and will be purchasing larger storage devices soon.
- derrida 12y agoI'm an engineer & I've been using a single 60gb SSD for over a year. I run a few virtual machines and when I'm done I delete shit I don't need or store it elsewhere. What do you use 4TB for? I could only imagine using it for watching TV but I don't like doing that. Everything else I just rent cheap servers.
- selmnoo 12y agoMusic, games, movies alone easily take up like 3TB out of the 4TB. Big software (3d cad software, some gfx software, etc.) take up a TB. One of the NI instrument collections (http://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/bundles/komplete-9/ http://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/bundl...) is like 100GB (I forget which one, I think it's the Piano one with the soundbank) -- that's just a single one. If you're working with media stuff, it's way too easy to find even 20TB to not be enough for your needs. And I'm just an amateur for goodness' sake! Oh, and I have an external 3TB drive where I house all of my backups and captures of old desktops. It's completely full, and I will be purchasing another ~3TB drive in the near future for backup purposes.
- derrida 12y agoYeah I understand it now! Those instruments are "tools" :-) A music collection is also understandable, but I generally stream, since various services I can run simply from my work environment (Emacs). I'm sort of scared to even get a 1TB disk because I'd worry about introducing distractions. I've liked the constraints 60gb has imposed on me. However, admittedly, as I've started contracting around various places each which has different environments, it'd probably soon upgrade to a 128Gb in order to do the "context switching" between the various virtual machines with Vagrant I need to get work done in various places, in the past I've managed to solve that by just having a development server at cheap places like Online.net, but it's nice to have the virtual environment locally to get around the typing delay caused by ping time in a terminal.
- pearjuice 12y ago>Apple wants to keep the price down Are you being sarcastic? If they really wanted to keep the price down, they wouldn't strive for 2x or higher profit. MacBooks (any Apple hardware) feature component-set easily sold at half the price. You are simply paying for the Apple logo.
- brandall10 12y agoYou do realize they just dropped the price of the Macbook Air across the board by $100, right?
- JetSpiegel 12y agoWhich tell you all you need to know about how they want to "keep prices low".
- jodrellblank 12y agoFunny how often this is repeated, yet no other laptop company has managed to walk in and take over. Almost as HP, Acer, Asus, Fujitsu, Toshiba, Sony and co. don't want an easy few hundred million dollars. Or as if you're wrong and there's more than a logo involved.
- andypants 12y agoApple wants to keep the price down so they can keep their margins high OP clearly means that Apple keeps their costs down, not the retail price.
- bananas 12y agoI only have 24.5Gb of data including family videos and Nikon NEFs. 128Gb is plenty for me.
- Igglyboo 12y agoPlenty enough for me, my gaming rig at home needs over a TB but I would use a macbook for development, don't need more than 50GB or so.
- jackalope 12y agoThese days, I get most of my entertainment online and store my code repositories and other permanent data on a home server. I wouldn't know how to fill 128GB on a laptop.
- trvz 12y agoYou could fill it up quickly with big-sized software and games.
- pabb 12y agoAha. You can spot the Apple fanboys rushing to contend this just by saying they don't use 128GB to begin with. The entire point is that pretty much any other (read: non-Apple) laptop/desktop you buy nowadays is going to come with at least 500 GB, and generally 1 TB nowadays. No need to get up in arms and whine that Apple is doing everything just right for your tastes. edit: I obviously wasn't referring to 1 TB SSDs. The parent's comment said that 128 GB is pretty paltry for storage capacity nowadays, as the thread is concerning the rate of growth of SSDs.
- matthewmacleod 12y agoThe entire point is that pretty much any other (read: non-Apple) laptop/desktop you buy nowadays is going to come with at least 500 GB, and generally 1 TB nowadays. Is that the case? Most machines I've seen around the cost of the Macbook Air still come with hard disks or 128G SSDs - maybe a couple might push that to 256. Indeed, I don't think I've even seen a laptop with 1TB of SSD, aside from the very-top-end-I-upgraded-it-especially Retina Macbook.
- hhw 12y agoWell, I'm no fan of Apple at all and haven't owned an Apple product since the II GS. And I'd argue against storing any significant data on a laptop or desktop drive, as this is one of the most likely components to fail. Data should be on a storage server with RAID. All you should have on your primary drive is your OS, applications, and active working set of data. Any archival data or larger files should go on the storage server.
- tim333 12y agoGlancing at amazon.co.uk's results for 512gb ssd laptops the cheapest non Apple on page 1 was £1,676.55 (Lenovo Yoga), Apple was actually a bit cheaper (macbook pro £1,213). Not really a scientific survey but they don't seem too bad.
- nardi 12y agoThe new MacBooks boot in 1 second. I'll take that any day over extra storage I don't need.
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- gonzo 12y agoI don't understand how keeping the price down keeps margins high. Perhaps you meant cost?
- kylec 12y agoYou're right, that statement was poorly phrased. Apple wants to meet a certain price point for their notebooks, but they also don't want to sacrifice on their margin to reach that price point, so they reduce the cost of manufacture by using less expensive components, like lower-capacity flash storage.
- Tloewald 12y agoThese hard drives are enterprise targeted and, I assume, rather expensive. Microsoft was selling Surface Pros with 32 GB not long ago, with over half occupied by Windows.
- jmpe 12y agoYes. When scaling down semiconductors your oxide shows weird behavior. In transistors this was one of the crisis that hindered miniaturisation, there were alternatives (like exotic high-k dielectrics) but semi corps tend to steer away from such things. Miniaturization happens not only on the surface (length and width) but also depth. This is where silicon oxides come into play. Flash tech relies either on charge trapping in the oxide itself or in a floating gate. Both become sensitive to effects like tunneling when you scale them down in the 10nm magnitude.
- ChuckMcM 12y agoOne of the interesting changes has been folks have been thinning out silicon wafers. Typically 700 microns there have been examples of working wafers as thin as 5 microns. If you stack 5 micron silicon you can put 100 chips in the same place you put 1 before, assuming you can figure out how to talk between them. Thru-silicon-vias (TSV) is the current poster child but there are better alternatives coming. Should be interesting when that comes to market.
- jacquesm 12y agoThis is a precursor to the next revolution in chips, 3D. It's funny how chips have of course always been three dimensional but the heat removal issues have so far stopped true 3D from happening (as far as I know). But SSDs have a completely different use pattern and likely don't run nearly as many Watts per volume of silicon so you could probably stack them way higher even if you didn't reduce the thickness of the layers all that much. Then it becomes a matter of routing and placement rather than heat dissipation. Xilinx is already doing something like this: https://www.semiwiki.com/forum/showwiki.php?title=Semi+Wiki:Three-Dimensional+Integrated+Circuit+3D+IC+Wiki https://www.semiwiki.com/forum/showwiki.php?title=Semi+Wiki:... Eventually this might even converge on something like a spherical shape, that's when the sum length of the connections is minimal (the surface area of the sphere is too, and that again is a heat removal problem).
- ChuckMcM 12y agoJim Gray was famous for predicting that the end point of computers were "smoking hairy golfballs". His reasoning was that spheres give you the shortest path length, there will be thousands of wires (hence the hair), and it will be difficult to dump the heat (smoking). I loved his image of a computer that looked like a a box of golf balls :-).
- jacquesm 12y agoHehe, cool, that's a very close description of the mental image I had when I wrote that, I was afraid that it would be dissed as ridiculous.
- velodrome 12y agoHere is a paper from two years ago talking about the the theoretical limits of SSD technology. The Bleak Future of NAND Flash Memory: http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/swanson/papers/FAST2012BleakFlash.pdf http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/swanson/papers/FAST2012BleakFla...
- Leynos 12y agoThe next doubling in capacity will likely come about through 3D NAND which allows for much larger feature sizes than current planar NAND. Samsung already have 3D NAND on the market (in 128Gb / die capacity), and other manufacturers intend to go down this route too.
- velodrome 12y agoUsing larger form factors like 3.5" or 5.25" can possibly help.
- reitzensteinm 12y agoYou can fit 403 MicroSD cards into the volume of a standard (9.5mm) 2.5" laptop hard drive. The largest MicroSD currently on the market is 128gb, meaning you can fit 51.5 TB of MicroSD cards into a 2.5" drive. SSDs need additional circuitry, chips and memory, but MicroSD cards aren't 100% flash either. This shows that the ceiling is very high even with current lithography. My guess is that there's just not much market for a $200k+, 50 TB 2.5" drive, but it would be possible to make in high volume production. If you need storage capacity, traditional hard drives will easily beat it in terms of TCO. If you need IOPS, it's much better to use an array of smaller high performance drives. I could picture it being useful in some military and space exploration applications but that's about all.
- iSnow 12y ago>space exploration applications Doubful, since they are not radiation hardened. I could rather see a market for smaller size SSDs which contain lots and lots of chips and thereby have their own RAID subsystems.