SanDisk co-founder: Flash to squeeze out hard drives and DRAM by 2020

The co-founder of SanDisk and one of the illustrious fathers of flash memory, Eli Harari, says that flash memory will “checkmate” hard drives by 2020. This is in stark contrast to Microsoft Research and UCSD, which earlier this week claimed thatsolid-state storage would meet its maker by 2024.

Speaking at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) on Monday,Harari not only proclaimed that NAND flash would supplant spinning-platter hard drives, but also that DRAM could be on the way out as well. “Today, the cost of NAND per gigabyte is 10 times lower than the cost of DRAM … and that’s not likely to change,” Harari said. “The question is, can 10 gigabytes of NAND or one gigabyte of DRAM give you a better performance boost?”

Flash has been the dominant storage medium for years in the mobile space — cheap NAND was one of the most important factors in the explosion of digital photography and smartphones — and through tablets, ultrabooks, and enterprise applications, SSDs are really starting to dig into the HDD market share. With the steadily declining price of solid-state drives and their far superior performance, it’s really no big surprise.

According to Harari, though, it will be 3D resistive RAM (3D-ReRAM) that results in “checkmate for the hard disk drive industry.” ReRAM is a very old tech, but for various reasons never made it to the limelight — until 2008, when HP created the first memresistor. In much the same way that Intel has moved to FinFET to scale beyond 22nm, 3D-ReRAM is expected to take over from NAND flash at around 11nm, sometime in the next few years.

It is anticipated that 3D-ReRAM will be so fast and high-density that hard drives will be reduced to specific use cases, much like magnetic tape. “I believe that by 2020, flash – -which is highly scaled NAND and 3D resistive RAM –- will be the undisputed king of storage,” Harari predicts.

Finally, Herari also notes that the emergence and increasing reliance on cloud computing and storage could pose an issue, especially for mobile devices. Ultimately, irrespective of how much flash storage we have, mobile bandwidth is finite. There’s no point having hundreds of gigabytes of ultra-fast flash storage both in the cloud and on your phone when it can cost tens of dollars to transfer a single gigabyte of cellular data over a few-megabit connection.

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Hitachi ships world’s first 4TB hard drive, sticks it to Thor

Hitachi, seemingly in defiance of the weather gods, has launched the world’s largest 3.5-inch hard drive: The monstrous 4TB Deskstar 5K. With a rotational speed of 5,900RPM, a 6Gbps SATA 3 interface, and the same 32MB of cache as its 2 and 3TB siblings, the 4TB model is basically the same beast — just with four platters instead of two or three. The list price is around $345 — not great, but definitely reasonable, given the current hard drive climate.

Curiously, though, this news doesn’t come in the form of a press release from Hitachi, but rather some actual boxed, on-the-shelf photos taken by Akiba, a PC leak site. We can only speculate why this is the case, but it’s probably down to the Thailand floods and uncertainty about continued production. The hard drive’s label clearly states that it’s made in Thailand  (pictured below), and it would seem foolhardy to announce a brand new product when component availability and pricing is so variable. It’s possible that the stock on the shelf was made before the floods, too.

Of course, at this juncture it’s now standard practice to ask “Just how much storage space do we need?” Only a technofool claims that an arbitrary amount is “enough,” but likewise, given the current state of computing, and excepting extreme power users, who really needs a 4TB hard drive? Is it even wise to pack a computer full of four-platter drives, instead of opting for smaller drives with fewer platters?

The other question worth asking is how much data we can squeeze into a hard disk drive — and the simple answer is “a lot more than 4TB.” A recent advance in platter data density promises up to 6TB per platter — and you can squeeze five platters into a 3.5-inch drive. So that’s 30TB in a single drive, and it’s fairly safe to assume that another discovery will come along in the next few years and boost capacity yet further.

How much storage capacity do you have in your main computer?

Update: The Hitachi website now has the product listing for the Deskstar 5K4000, and an external enclosure that houses the same drive. Still no official press release, though.

Read more at Akiba (machine translated)

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