Samsung’s Vice President of Samsung and Normal Supervisor of NAND Product Planning Group, Kyungryun Kim, has revealed the corporate needs to launch a 1PB (1000TB) SSD “within the subsequent decade” (ed: that might imply within the subsequent ten years or within the decade beginning 2031) with analysis being carried out on three fronts (bodily scaling, logical scaling and packaging) as a way to attain that focus on.

The South Korean tech large has had a 128TB QLC SSD within the pipeline since not less than August 2017 (yep, nearly six years in the past) and a 128TB PCIe SSD was unveiled again in August 2022 in the course of the Flash Reminiscence Summit.

It’s subsequently fairly becoming that the bombshell 1PB announcement was made at one other occasion, the 2023 China Flash Reminiscence Market Summit. 

Past PLC

One factor that’s nearly sure is that this drive gained’t be utilizing QLC (Quad-layer Cell) due to information density which is mainly the variety of bytes per unit quantity. 

Area of interest storage participant Nimbus Information unveiled a 100TB SSD again in 2017 but it surely was a 3.5-inch drive and had a sticker value of $40,000. Samsung will in all probability want to vary the shape issue of the drive (the 128TB SSD from 2022 was in a 2.5-inch kind issue) or transfer to PLC (Penta-layer Cell) and even additional to HLC (Hexa-layer Cell).

Given the capability and the audience, our cash is on 1PB to be deployed on the business customary for storage at hyper scalers, EDSFF, extra particularly, the E1L (aka the ruler kind issue). You gained’t be capable of shove them in a desktop PC, not to mention a laptop computer.

Samsung will not be the one producer within the race to the Petabyte SSD: SK Hynix (that absorbed Intel’s SSD division), Kioxia, Micron and newcomer Yangtze Storage are all piling on the layers on NAND flash (as much as 238) in a bid to cram extra bytes on silicon.

HDD on life help

The typical promoting value of SSD has fallen to about $50 per TB and we’d anticipate that to fall to round $10 in a decade, that means {that a} 1PB SSD ought to price round $10,000. By the top of the last decade, onerous disk drives can have reached 120TB with costs (at present round $15 per TB) prone to fall to $5 per TB.

Whether or not or not that might be sufficient to avoid wasting onerous disk drives from oblivion stays to be seen. One must keep in mind that hyperscalers – not finish customers – and enterprise prospects are those hoarding the storage elements, not the top customers’ units.

Storage on these have stalled at between 256GB and 512GB and I don’t imagine that it’ll change a lot no matter what futurologists predict. The steadiness of demand has shifted to information facilities and repair suppliers, pushed, paradoxically by finish customers.

So onerous drives have disappeared from laptops and can in all probability disappear from desktops fully by this time subsequent yr as the common value of 1TB SSD reaches parity with onerous disk drives. This may nearly definitely imply the top of the venerable SATA interface as properly. 

Through ASM Magazine (opens in new tab)