Solid state drives are supposed to be so much better than conventional and mechanical hard drives for PCs. SSDs are supposed to be faster, less prone to failures and use less power. So far, the only real issue with SSDs has been their much higher cost compared to regular hard drives.
Now a group of researchers have posted word that the future of SSDs could be shorter than first believed. Computerworld.com reports that a new research paper claims that as the circuitry of NAND flash-based drives keeps going down, more and more performance issues come up, including latency and read and write errors.
The group, which includes a team member from Microsoft Research, tested 52 such drives from six different companies, with circuity ranging from 72nm to 25nm. The results show that latency in those drives increased as the circuity got smaller.
The research report then predicted that SSDs would have 6.5nm circuity by 2024. By then, the latency issues will have doubled and bit error rates would have tripled for those drives. The report gives the opinion that "it"s not going to be viable to go past 6.5nm ... 2024 is the end."
The good news? SSDs are expected to have storage capacities as high as 16 TB by 2024. By that time, researchers believe that we will have to pick between "capacity or performance" for those kinds of storage drives.