The Flash Storage Revolution Is Here

The Flash Storage Revolution Is Here


The Flash Storage Revolution Is Here




Sasquatch Storage

The Samsung drive, called PM1633a, was first reported by and announced at last week’s Flash Memory Summit in California. While its size is impressive, it’s all the more astonishing for being a solid state drive—comprising flash memory chips—as opposed to more conventional (and affordable) hard drives that rely on magnetically coated spinning discs.

While SSDs have been faster and more rugged than their HDD counterparts, they have until recently been far more limited in capacity. To this point, the largest 2.5-inch (the size of Samsung’s latest) SSD you could buy was 4TB, at a cost of around $6,000. Even high-capacity spinning disc drives top out at around 10TB. While the PM1633a probably hasn’t remedied the cost situation, a four-fold leap in size is incredible.

What it’s not, though, is unexpected. In fact, Samsung laid the groundwork for this very device years ago.



The implications of storage breakthroughs like this go beyond just data centers and laptops.

By applying an innovative manufacturing technique to existing flash technology, Samsung has created a hard drive that could store well over 3,000 high-definition copies of Mad Max: Fury Road on your MacBook Pro. It might sound unlikely that you’ll ever need 16TB of space or be willing to pay for it. For now these are far more likely to end up in servers; the closest you’ll likely come to using one is if it happens to wind up powering a cloud you tap into.

It won’t be long at all, though, before they find their way into personal computers, even laptops. “I would expect in three to five years, for a 2.5-inch 16TB SSD to be in a workstation-class notebook,” says Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst of Moor Insights & Strategy. In the interim, bigger, cheaper storage solutions at the top end help drive prices at the lower end—the stuff you actually use right now—down.

That amount of storage in the home has plenty of obvious applications, but also presents a few surprising use cases. Moorhead notes that despite our recent migration to the cloud, hard drives of that magnitude would obviate much of the need to borrow some massive, faceless tech company’s digital locker to stash our stuff. That doesn’t just mean home movies, either; that amount of room could enable localized smart home solutions that offer more privacy and security than leaning on the cloud currently does.

Even more exciting is that when that level of tech does trickle down to consumers, it won’t necessarily even come from Samsung; V-NAND isn’t the only vertical NAND technology out there. Intel and Micron recently announced that they’re working on something quite similar, though they don’t expect to produce consumer devices based on the technology until early next year. Toshiba has dabbled in 3D NAND, with products expected by the end of next year. All of them have the systems in place to produce equally, if not more, impressive drives. Samsung left the starting block first, but that may not matter much in a race that will be measured in years.

The implications of storage breakthroughs like this go beyond data centers and laptops, though. “Memory and storage are the two things that are holding up huge innovations in biotech, in design, and for that matter even artificial intelligence,” Moorhead says. “They’ve become a fundamental building block for moving the industry forward. These big innovations at the top trickle their way down into cars, into phones, over a five to seven year period.”

The innovations he refers to include the manufacturing smarts flexed by Samsung, Intel and Micron, and Toshiba. It also, though, includes another recent breakthrough, one that hasn’t yet manifested itself as a product, but could far do more to shape the storage and memory industry.

Cross Fire

As exciting as a 16TB SSD may be, it still represents an iterative step, a manufacturing trick that found new ways to stuff the same basic pieces into increasingly smaller spaces. The potentially much bigger breakthrough? Intel and Micro’s 3D XPoint (pronounced “crosspoint”) technology, which completely rethinks the way we’ve been making memory for years.

“I think the design change is more exciting,” says Moorhead. “It’s a radical, different design that nobody has, versus taking your memory to the next node, which is essentially Moore’s Law.”

You can read a more in-depth take on how 3D XPoint works here, but the short version goes something like this: Rather than rely on transistors to store information, as traditional flash memory does, 3D Xpoint deploys a microscopic mesh of wires, coordinated by something called a “selector” that can be stacked on top of one another.

The result is “non-volatile” storage, meaning it holds onto its data even when the power’s off, that’s 1,000 times faster than NAND flash, and 10 times denser than the volatile DRAM (dynamic random access memory) that PCs use to keep track of temporary data. In other words, it’s a single solution that can handle both memory and storage, and do both better, in most ways, than anything currently available.

Intel has said not to expect any 3D Xpoint products until next year, but when they appear they’ll be in a position to transform multiple industries, from the esoteric to the squarely consumer-focused.

“Any artificial intelligence or object recognition you want to have on a device works a lot better with XPoint … The more you can put into that really fast memory space, the better your artificial intelligence is going to be,” says Moorhead. “The simple application is gaming, where you’re waiting two to three minutes on some PCs to get to the next level. You can actually have entirely multiple levels in 3D Xpoint instead of having to wait for all that data.”

Better still, Moorhead projects the same five year timeframe until we hit consumer-friendly XPoint affordability. That may feel like a long time now, but given it’s been nearly that many decades since we’ve had a memory and storage innovation of this magnitude, we can afford a little patience. Besides, that gives everyone else some time to catch up.

“I can guarantee you that both Samsung and Toshiba have their plays as well,” Moorhead says. As well they should. Who wouldn’t want to enlist in a revolution like this?