Looking To The Future: NAND Flash Scales Up to 64 TB SSDs in 2030

Over the past few years, the NAND Flash industry has gone through two major shifts in technology: the movement from 1 to 2 to 3 bits per cell, which directly increases bit density and capacity, and also moving from planar flash to variants of 3D stacking. Stacking can refer to individual NAND dies, as well as stacking those dies into a single package: both of these features are being extensively investigated to increase density also. There are two main drivers for this: reduction in cost, and capacity. However, despite this, the predictions in the ITRS report for NAND flash are primarily looking at improvements to numbers of layers rather than lithography changes or moving to more bits per cell.

As we can see, TLC (according to the report) is here to stay. QLC, or whatever you want to call it, is not mentioned. The two changes are the number of memory layers, moving from 32 today to 128 around 2022 and then 256/512 by 2030, and the number of word-lines in one 3D NAND string. This gives a product density projection of 256 Gbit packages today to 1 Tbit packages in 2022 and 4 Tbit packages in 2030.

If we apply this to consumer drives available today, we can extrapolate potential SSD sizes for the future. The current Samsung 850 EVO 4 TB uses Samsung’s 48-layer third generation V-NAND to provide 256 Gbit TLC parts. Alongside the 4 TB of memory, the controller requires 4 GB of DRAM, which is another concern to remember. So despite the report stating 256 Gbit in 32-layer, we have 256 Gbit in 48-layer, which is a difference primarily in die-size predictions for the report. Still, if we go off of the product density we should see 12 TB SSDs by 2020, 16 TB in 2022, 48 TB in 2028 and 64 TB drives in 2030. It’s worth noting that the ITRS report doesn’t mention power consumption in this table, nor controller developments which may be a substantial source of performance and/or capacity implementations.

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  • Dobson123 - Wednesday, July 27, 2016 - link

    I'm getting old.
  • 3ogdy - Wednesday, July 27, 2016 - link

    That's what I thought about when I read "TEN year anniversary". It certainly doesn't feel like it was yesterday...but it certainly feels as old as "last month" is in my mind and that's mostly thanks to i7s, FXs, IPS, SSDs and some other things that proved to be more or less of a landmark in tech history.
  • close - Thursday, July 28, 2016 - link

    I just realized I have an old HP desktop with a C2D E6400 that will turn 10 in a few months and it's still humming along nicely every day. It ran XP until this May when I switched it to Win10 (and a brand new SSD). The kind of performance it offers in day to day work even to this day amazes me and sometimes it even makes me wonder why people with very basic workloads would buy more expensive stuff than this.
  • junky77 - Thursday, July 28, 2016 - link

    marketing, misinformation, lies and the need to feel secure and have something "better"
  • Solandri - Friday, July 29, 2016 - link

    How do you think those of us old enough to remember the 6800 and 8088 feel?
  • JimmiG - Sunday, July 31, 2016 - link

    Well my first computer had a 6510 running at 1 MHz.
    Funnily enough, I never owned a Core 2 CPU. I had an AM2+ motherboard and I went the route of the Athlon X2, Phenom and then Phenom II before finally switching to Intel with a Haswell i7.

    Core 2 really changed the CPU landscape. For the first time in several years, Intel firmly beat AMD in efficiency and raw performance, something AMD has still not recovered from.
  • oynaz - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link

    We miss or C64s and Amigas
  • ArtShapiro - Tuesday, August 23, 2016 - link

    What about those of us who encountered vacuum tube computers?
  • AndrewJacksonZA - Wednesday, July 27, 2016 - link

    I'm still using my E6750... :-)
  • just4U - Thursday, July 28, 2016 - link

    I just retired my dads E6750. It was actually still trucking along in a Asus Nvidia board that I had figured would be dodgy because the huge aluminum heatsink on the chipset was just nasty.. Made the whole system a heatscore. Damned if that thing didn't last right into 2016. Surprised the hell out of me.

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