The HDD market is currently practically dead, since SSDs, due to their performance, have eaten it. The only advantage left to mechanical hard drives is capacity, but it has little left. Samsung has announced that they are working on a 1000TB SSD that would arrive in 2030.
Steam tells us that more than 50% of users have a 1TB storage drive. We can go through Amazon and see that the SSDs, whether SATA or M.2 NVMe, of 1 TB are among the best sellers. Now, Samsung wants us to forget about these “ridiculous” capabilities.
The sentence to the HDD is being developed by Samsung
A few months ago S.K. Hynix ad 238 layer memories Y Micron 232 layer memories. These data surely do not tell you anything, but they allow you to reduce the cost of the Terabyte in SSD units. These memories should already start to reach the market, but they have been delayed due to the poor market situation.
During the Samsung Tech Days 2022, the company has said that it has plans to create “1000+ layers” NAND memories by 2030. We said that in 8 years the number of layers in each memory would be multiplied by 5, increased capacity and reduced costs. These units will not be exclusive to the professional sector, they would also be used for the domestic sector.
Despite the presentation, the company has not assured the existence of these units. We mean that we do not know if it is a simple forecast because of how the layers are scaling or if by then they plan to have laboratory samples or mass-produce memories.
Talk about 1000 layer NAND memories or more for SSD drives, it is something very interesting. Different solutions are emerging that want to be postulated as an alternative to SSDs. Some are silica optical discs or the classic tapes, but they would hardly reach the domestic market.
Currently, the average price of 1TB SSD of capacity is already falling below the 100 euros. It is also highlighted by several specialists in this segment, that SSDs and HDDs, in some capacities, will already achieve price parity in the next year.
It is not unreasonable to reach 1000 TB
Samsung above all has focused on reducing costs and, therefore, prices of SSDs. But, at the same time, increasing the number of layers, we increase the capacity.
Nimbus Data produces a 3.5-inch form factor, 100TB capacity, industrial grade SSD. This unit is based on 64-layer MLC (2 bits per cell) memory chips. Using QLC memories (4 bits per cell) of, for example, 1024 layers, means multiplying the number of layers by 16. This would mean that we could get to exceed 1 PB (1000 TB) of capacity in an SSD, maintaining the 3.5-inch format.
Although a 1000 TB SSD for the home user does not make sense, for the business sector it totally does. It would allow these companies to reduce costs when it comes to storage. But, for the user, it is also good that there are 1000 TB SSDs, since it could mean, for example, that in the future we will see 100 TB SSDs for 100-200 euros.
We speak, at all times, of hypotheses and different theories, since Samsung is still researching and developing in this regard.
