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Samsung-SSD

E'er since solid-state drives (SSDs) hit the consumer market, they've offered significantly meliorate operation than traditional hard drives (HDDs), just at a significantly higher price. The gap between SSDs and HDDs in terms of capacity and toll has decreased dramatically, simply hard drives notwithstanding have an edge over SSDs in price per GB. Samsung wants to slash the existing gap by 2022 and offer a 512GB SDD for the same cost as a 1TB HDD today.

Right now, SSDs generally toll between twenty-50 cents/GB depending on capacity, NAND blazon, and form factor. Conventional 1TB hard drives are down to about 4 cents per GB, though this too varies depending on make and model. 1TB drives aren't always the most cost-effective option — as manufacturers move to college platter densities, it wouldn't surprise u.s.a. to see 2TB – 4TB drives offering higher capacities at a lower price per GB. Delivering a 512GB SSD at a $40 price means a significant cost reduction betwixt now and 2022; Samsung needs to cut the electric current price of NAND storage by roughly two-thirds to hitting its target.

The cardinal to doing this will be scaling up Samsung'southward 3D NAND production and layer density. As we've previously discussed, 3D NAND (or 5-NAND) stands the NAND array on edge relative to conventional 2D planar product. This allows for much denser memory chips, as shown below:

3D-NAND-Density

These density figures are only for Samsung's first-generation 3D NAND.

Conventional planar NAND shrank the space between the cells with each generation. V-NAND focuses on scaling upwards by adding new layers rather than taking upward less space per layer. While this currently offers amend scaling characteristics and longevity than 2D NAND, it's by no means easy. Samsung initially debuted 32-layer NAND and announced 48-layer NAND last year, simply took near a yr to bring it into wide production. The company volition need to hit 64 or 96-layers to hit its intended price targets, and it might need a die shrink as well. To date, all of Samsung's 3D NAND has been produced on a 40nm procedure. Cutting existing prices by a farther two-thirds volition probably require an ambitious engineering rollout.

Hopefully, price reductions this significant will also spur adoption by OEMs. SSDs are much more than common than they used to be, though the bulk of PCs notwithstanding ship with spinning media. Some manufacturers apply bulldoze caching to offering a performance boost while even so cutting costs. But many don't, or but offer SSDs or cache drives on the most expensive models. This makes a sure caste of sense given the low ASPs of your average laptop or desktop PC, merely information technology'south still unfortunate. Hopefully in the next few years, we'll run across SSDs aircraft every bit standard more ofttimes, peculiarly as rising capacities arrive easier for people to rely on a single drive for storage. High-end drives are still setting capacity records, but the extreme price of these solutions makes them far more expensive than anything in conventional magnetic disks.