Samsung Electronics has revealed its roadmap for its SSD ecosystem on the 2022 Samsung Tech Day and it seems tasty. It has plans to “stack over 1,000 layers” in its most superior NAND chip by 2030 though it has stopped in need of revealing whether or not it will be precise merchandise accessible on cabinets (if these are nonetheless round by the top of the last decade), merchandise shipped to prospects (like Teamgroup) or samples in its labs.

Nonetheless, the prospect of getting an SSD with 1,000-layer NAND is a very attractive one after the other when quite a few storage applied sciences (laborious disk drives, silica, tapes, DNA, you identify it) are attempting to displace the medium as the most well liked property on the earth of bits and bytes.

Earlier this 12 months, SK Hynix and Micron introduced that they’d launch 238-layer and 232-layer merchandise respectively which – on paper – will dramatically carry down the price of Terabyte for strong state drives. A caveat although is that these timelines are more likely to be elastic relying on demand and provide globally. The present financial scenario worldwide might power firms to chop again on R&D and lengthen the gaps between product launches.

The typical value of SSD is at their lowest so far with 2TB SSDs extensively accessible for lower than $100 and consultants have forecasted that SSD and HDD will attain parity on sure capacities by this time subsequent 12 months with the profitable enterprise market being the one one kind of immune for now.

1PB SSD on the horizon?

Extra layers not solely imply cheaper merchandise but additionally greater storage densities. At the moment the world’s largest SSD is a 3.5-inch 100TB mannequin from Nimbus Information, one which is utilizing a 64-layer MLC chip; a 1024-layer TLC/QLC chip would pack 16 occasions extra layer, which put a 1PB (1000TB) strong state drive solidly within the realm of potentialities earlier than the top of this decade.

Who wants that type of capability although? Cloud storage firms like iDrive or BackBlaze, Hyperscalers like Google or Microsoft, social networks like Instagram or Fb.

In 2020, throughout an interview with TechRadar Professional, Nimbus Information CEO Thomas Isakovich urged that a lot greater capacities (200TB and 400TB) might be reached by 2023 “relying on the timing of NAND density positive aspects”. A 1PB SSD can be an order of magnitude larger than what laborious drive producers have on their roadmaps.

A 100TB laborious disk drive is what Seagate expects to launch by 2030 with the present most capability (as of October 2022) being 26TB. 30TB drives are more likely to be the flagship capability in 2023 and past that, will increase are incremental reasonably than exponential.

Throughout the identical occasion, Samsung introduced that its 1Tb TLC V-NAND can be accessible to its prospects by the top of 2022 with its subsequent technology TLC T-NAND – more likely to be 2Tb – slated for mass availability someday in 2024. Following this trajectory, 4Tb, 8Tb and 16Tb NAND chips may go to market in 2026, 2028 and 2030 respectively. In parallel, its engineers are “accelerating” the transition to QLC with no phrases on PLC (penta-level cell).