How long will HDD's remain relevant to home users?

Derfnofred said:
While the areal density of magnetic drives is definitely petering out, using present SSD density trends as a future predictor seems, um, optimistic. They were, for quite a long time, process-wise way behind the ball, but a huge portion of the gains has been in pushing down to the lithographic nodes associated with other chips (and picking up all kinds of loose hanging fruit). And as much as we've staved off Moore's law this far, it honestly appears that we're running out of atoms. Continued 3D fabrication will certainly benefit NAND flash, don't get me wrong, but we're very much in the golden era of SSD improvements and future trends will start bending down.

As for the consumer space, I see NAND taking over more and more, especially in laptops. They're smaller and lower power--not to mention shock resistant. I've certainly been noting that generation after generation of laptop is less bulky than the last. :)
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They can always make 3.5" full height SSD's, WAY more space for NAND chips. Current lithography size is not the limiting factor. If someone wanted to they could easily make an 8TB+ SSD in the 3.5" form factor today.
 
leeleatherwood said:
They can always make 3.5" full height SSD's, WAY more space for NAND chips. Current lithography size is not the limiting factor. If someone wanted to they could easily make an 8TB+ SSD in the 3.5" form factor today.
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It is in terms of getting $/GB down--throwing more NAND chips at the system will only get you so far. Controller/support electronics costs are probably going remain relatively constant.
 
Derfnofred said:
It is in terms of getting $/GB down--throwing more NAND chips at the system will only get you so far. Controller/support electronics costs are probably going remain relatively constant.
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With the current trend, everything is faster and smaller, so always new tech leading to high R&D costs and high(er) prices. In really yes faster is nice but there is certainly a point of diminishing returns. 50k IOPS vs 150k IOPS really is going to go completely unnoticed in almost all tasks.

Instead what they could do is just keep the current tech but put it in the 3.5" size, mass produce the controllers, NAND, PCBs, etc. They could easily cut costs this way.

Basically, split SSD development into two different branches. 1) Faster and smaller (physical size, lithography and capacity), 2) Slower but larger.

If Samsung said "Hey, lets do a feature freeze of the 850 EVO but focus on increasing capacity by just cramming in more NAND and standardize this design for 2+ years" we could easily have high capacity SSD's for cheap.
 
leeleatherwood said:
Instead what they could do is just keep the current tech but put it in the 3.5" size, mass produce the controllers, NAND, PCBs, etc. They could easily cut costs this way.
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Nope, that would not significantly cut costs. In fact, in some areas it would raise costs (larger PCBs, larger cases, more chip packages).

Overall, the difference would be negligible. The $ / GB would be almost the same as a 2.5" SSD, since the cost of the flash dominates once you get over about 256GB.
 
Yeah, we're really getting to the cost of processing a silicon wafer as the driving cost of a SSD at a certain point (mo silicon, mo money). Cost per transistor dropped from 28nm to 20nm, but not really at 14nm. Not exactly sure how that will translate over to NAND flash, as there are enough differences in fab.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8367/intels-14nm-technology-in-detail (And lets be honest: Intel has the best cmos fabs around)
 
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If you are streaming and just doing large storage pool then a mechanical drive is more than adequate. Blu-Ray Streaming does not even stress USB2 let alone a 100MB sec Sata1 interface...

Just like the floppy before it the mechanical HDD will go the way of antiquity but flash has to become faster mainstream level. Right now SSD flash is too expensive for 1TB and above
 
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