Samsung predicts death of hard drive

efcoins · Post by **efcoins** » Thu Sep 15, 2005 4:33 am

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/77342/samsu ... drive.html

(In case the link does not work)

The familiar whirr of the hard disk may soon be a thing of the past. Korean electronics giant Samsung has introduced a new high capacity 16Gbit NAND chip which, it says, will revolutionise storage in the future.
The single NAND chip contains 16.4 billion transistors. It is based on a 50nm process - 20 per smaller than the 60nm process it replaces. Although NAND chips are currently used in a variety of portable devices from mobile phones to MP3 players, a 32Gb memory card built out of the chips can hold around 8,000 MP3 files or 32 hours of DVD-quality movies which could open a whole new market for portable video devices

With NAND flash memory density doubling every twelve months, we should see 32Gbit NANDs this time next year leading to 64Gbyte memory cards and the following year 128Gbyte devices. At this rate of advance, solid-state memory is likely to replace hard disks drives not only in PDAs and notebooks but perhaps in the future desktops and even servers.

Samsung says it will begin shipping the new high capacity NAND chips in 2006 which should appear in memory cards late next year or early 2007.

ryboto · Post by **ryboto** » Thu Sep 15, 2005 5:23 am

By the time they can make a steady state drive out of a couple of these things for cheap, the cost of a 500gb hd will be well below $200, maybe. So, at first, i imagine you'll have the option of paying a lot for a steady state drive, or paying half that for 2-3 times the capacity with a standard HD. they've already got this:
http://neoseeker.com/news/story/4971/
but I imagine the price is still more than I paid for most of my hardware.

scruzbeachbum · Post by **scruzbeachbum** » Thu Sep 15, 2005 5:45 am

It'll certainly be the death of the hard drive....for small capacity applications.

perplex · Post by **perplex** » Thu Sep 15, 2005 6:07 am

i think everyone can predict solid state to take over the job of conventional mechanical hard disk drives. but the question is "WHEN?"

hyperq · Post by **hyperq** » Thu Sep 15, 2005 6:38 am

Performance is also an issue. The current memory-card drives are a lot slower than regular hard drives. SATA 1 can transfer 1.5Gbps and SATA 2 can trasfer 3Gbps. If Samsung can beat that, then they are really onto something.

Duckspeak · Post by **Duckspeak** » Thu Sep 15, 2005 6:53 am

Performance is also an issue. The current memory-card drives are a lot slower than regular hard drives. SATA 1 can transfer 1.5Gbps and SATA 2 can trasfer 3Gbps. If Samsung can beat that, then they are really onto something.

SATA controllers have that theoretical ceiling, yes, but the fastest SATA drive in the world probably couldn't exceed 75 MB/sec. These days flash drives are breaking 30 MB/sec, about as fast as current high-end notebook drives.

Kwiet · Post by **Kwiet** » Thu Sep 15, 2005 6:56 am

I can see 64GB memory drives coming into vogue in 2008.
Put the operating system on the 64GB drive, normal programs and such and use those 1TB per platter parallel recording type hard drives holding all the date (movies, music, pictures, videos etc.)
For use silence freaks, the memory drive can be the only active one until the storage hard drives are accessed and they can shut off within a user selectable time after the access.
If they show up later next year, I can see the SPCR diehards reporting on how quiet their Antec P180 cased, Phantom 500, heat pipe cooled dual-core Turion equipped beasts running ???? video cards and Samsung 32GB memory drives operate.
A dual-core Turion that fits S939 sounds good to me. I will wait a few years when I build a new box for the memory drives.

scruzbeachbum · Post by **scruzbeachbum** » Thu Sep 15, 2005 7:32 am

I think it'll be further out than 2008 for 64GB...at least for a reasonably priced 64GB

Hifriday · Post by **Hifriday** » Thu Sep 15, 2005 7:42 am

Ummm... can you say "iPod Nano"!?
Some Japanese sight dissected one and seemed to show the flash memory was on one chip, I guess this must have been the 2GByte version (ie 16GBit), the 4GByte probably has two chips? Begin shipping in 2006 huh... guess Apple is celebrating the New Year early!

At $249 for the 4GB Nano (shipped) that's only $40 more than a 4GB CF card!! Plus you are getting a MP3 player, earbuds, battery, color LCD screen, click-wheel and Apple branding (you know Apple didn't pay a lot for those chips). I've been waiting to buy a large capacity USB drive and when I saw the Nano, I just couldn't resist, mine will be arriving next week!!

According to this old article Samsung already announced a 16GByte solid state 2.5" drive for notebooks and tablets that was supposed to come out in August.

scruzbeachbum · Post by **scruzbeachbum** » Thu Sep 15, 2005 8:18 am

iPod nano memory picture from the article

and thisfrom Samsung's website.

So, the K9WAG08U1M is a 2Gbit x 8 Bit. Wonder why Samsung is saying 2H '06 for production?

Oh ho! Found this inside of the datasheet: "The K9WAG08U1M is composed of two K9K8G08U0M chips which are selected separately by each CE1 and CE2."

They are doing chip stacking inside the package. So a true one chip 16Gbit is what they are brining out in their 50nm process...

Hifriday · Post by **Hifriday** » Thu Sep 15, 2005 9:09 am

Well according to a Reuters article, Samsung supplies 55% of the world markets NAND chips and Apple has made a deal to take up to 40% of Samsung's production for the second half of 2005. Well probably with such a large deal either it will be 2006 before Samsung is able to supply the rest of the market with this new chip, or giving Apple exclusivity until 2006 was part of the deal, or maybe both.

Some interesting excerpts...

Nam said Samsung has aggressively courted Apple, offering extremely low prices on its NAND chips to encourage the firm to switch to flash memory instead of hard disk drives for its iPods.

The price of NAND flash chips is about double that of hard disk drives at the 4-gigabyte capacity level.

Analysts said the December quarter traditionally accounted for about 50-55 percent of Apple's annual iPod shipments. This suggested Apple could ship at least 15 million iPods in the coming Christmas quarter if past trends continued, creating an acute shortage in the global NAND flash market.

This tighter supply would also be combined in a rare instance with cheaper flash memory chips, as Samsung's low price quotes would depress average prices in the industry, analysts said.

mrk22 · Post by **mrk22** » Thu Sep 15, 2005 9:28 am

Doesn't flash memory have a limited number of write cycles? You're not going to hit the 100,000 write limit with a PS2 memory card, but I could easily see that happen on a PC.

frostedflakes · Post by **frostedflakes** » Thu Sep 15, 2005 10:06 am

I think it depends on the flash. I have a SanDisk industrial-grade drive that is rated for >2,000,000 write/erase cycles.

scruzbeachbum · Post by **scruzbeachbum** » Thu Sep 15, 2005 10:10 am

From Samsung's data sheet:

• Reliable CMOS Floating-Gate Technology
- Endurance : 100K Program/Erase Cycles(with 1bit/512Byte
ECC)
- Data Retention : 10 Years

My future iPod will be extinct (as will I) b4 I go thru 100k program erase cycles...for a PC, though... assume a 5 yr life and it's only 54 writes/erases per day.

mb2 · Post by **mb2** » Thu Sep 15, 2005 11:42 am

scruzbeachbum wrote:From Samsung's data sheet:

• Reliable CMOS Floating-Gate Technology
- Endurance : 100K Program/Erase Cycles(with 1bit/512Byte
ECC)
- Data Retention : 10 Years

My future iPod will be extinct (as will I) b4 I go thru 100k program erase cycles...for a PC, though... assume a 5 yr life and it's only 54 writes/erases per day.

so u wipe/rewrite your entire hard drive 54 times a day, everyday, for 5 years?

if the flash drives can be made large enough, and there is a load-sharing system (which won't be a problem as it doesn't matter where it is located on the drive.. also therefore defragging isn't necessary AFAIK, which also means less write/re-writes), i don't think the 'limited writes' will be as much of a problem as everyone things.
besides, if they market a drive for the PC i'd imagine they'd make it stand more read/write cycles (as they do/ can with 'industrial grade' ones.
also by the time the tech advances enough to give us decent capacity per $, then i'd imagine the read/write cycles-related technology will have also advanced somewhat

scruzbeachbum · Post by **scruzbeachbum** » Thu Sep 15, 2005 12:22 pm

mb2 wrote:so u wipe/rewrite your entire hard drive 54 times a day, everyday, for 5 years?

I merely point out the ave number of writes/erases per day given the current specs. Feel free to run with it to left field.

Chances are (even with indexing, Ghost, Go Back, etc turned off) my PC writes something to the HDD 54 times in an hour. (just think of your browser cache if nothing else...). It'll be a few years before flash drive sizes will get to a size and price point where I'd even consider buying one. I'll worry about data write cycles then.

IdontexistM8 · Post by **IdontexistM8** » Thu Sep 15, 2005 3:26 pm

Whatever the score you've got to admit this is exciting times for storage...oh and keeping the noise down.

scruzbeachbum · Post by **scruzbeachbum** » Thu Sep 15, 2005 3:48 pm

Yep - it's extremely cool in the near term for Camera memory, thumb drives and giving me future iPod nano envy when they get to 8GB or more.

cotdt · Post by **cotdt** » Thu Sep 15, 2005 4:44 pm

fast 64GB memory drives for less than $400 would be really sweet!

Reachable · Post by **Reachable** » Thu Sep 15, 2005 4:58 pm

Let's define the question:

By 100,000 write/erase cycles do they mean for the drive as a whole or for each bit unit on the drive?

Enormous and important difference.....

scruzbeachbum · Post by **scruzbeachbum** » Thu Sep 15, 2005 5:09 pm

First of all, the 100k cycles refers to the Samsung chips...not a drive in particular... here's a quick look at Flash via wikipedia:

One limitation of flash memory is that while it can be read or programmed a byte or a word at a time in a random access fashion, it must be erased a "block" at a time. Starting with a freshly erased block, any byte within that block can be programmed. However, once a byte has been programmed, it cannot be changed again until the entire block is erased. In other words, flash memory (specifically NOR flash) offers random-access read and programming operations, but cannot offer random-access rewrite or erase operations. When compared to a hard disk drive, a further limitation is the fact that flash memory has a finite number of erase-write cycles, so that care has to be taken when moving hard-drive based applications, such as operating systems, to flash-memory based devices such as CompactFlash. This effect is partially offset by some chip firmware or filesystem drivers by counting the writes and dynamically remapping the blocks in order to spread the write operations between the sectors, or by write verification and remapping to spare sectors in case of write failure.

Interestingly, the Tungsten T5 PDA and Treo 650 smartphone from PalmOne, released in late 2004, use NAND flash to back up the contents of main memory during normal operations. PalmOne names this technique "non-volatile file system" (NVFS). It gives the illusion of a RAM storage pool that does not lose any of its data when power is removed. This PalmOne knowledge base article explains how this technique works on the Treo 650.

The cost per byte of flash memory remains significantly higher than the corresponding cost of a hard disk drive, and that (on top of finite number of erase-write cycles previously mentioned) has prevented flash from becoming a solid state replacement for the hard disk drive on normal desktop and laptop computers.

frostedflakes · Post by **frostedflakes** » Thu Sep 15, 2005 5:47 pm

Just some math you guys might find interesting. I calculated (hopefully correctly) how long it would take the SanDisk drive I referenced in my earlier post to reach it's rated write/erase cycle limit. I'm sure there are probably factors I don't even know about that haven't been considered (I'm not an EE -- although I hope to be in about four years), but it should be pretty accurate I'd think.

Here are the assumptions:

256MB capacity
Writing constantly to the flash at it's maximum sustained write speed (9MB/s)
The drive's firmware has been written to spread wear evenly across all bits
Block size of 512B
>2,000,000 program cycles per block

This comes out to 524,288 blocks/drive. The drive is capable of writing to 18,432 blocks/second. This means it takes 28.4... s to write to every block on the drive. It would take 56,888,888.8... s to write to every block two million times. This means you could write to the disk constantly for roughly 1.8 years before you reach its rated write/erase cycle limit. Higher capacity drives would have an advantage, as there are more bits to spread the wear across.

Assuming everything else is the same, a drive rated for 100,000 write/erase cycles would reach it's limit after about a month.

Post by **Rusty075** » Thu Sep 15, 2005 6:37 pm

You do realise that bitmicro has been making SS drives for years, right?

Their current top line offers capacities up to 155Gb. Sustained transfer is limited, only 44MB/sec, but latency is 42microseconds (or about 2000 times shorter than a 7200rpm HDD), and burst throughput pegs at 320MB/s. They even sport a temperature range of -60° to 95°, and are rated for 1500G's. Lifespan? Rated for an MTBF of 2million hours.

Downside? They cost about $1000.....

....per gigabyte.

ronrem · Post by **ronrem** » Sat Sep 17, 2005 12:39 pm

If we take all the info in this thread and consider that once a technology becomes the mainstream-high volume thing,I suspect that storage of HD capacity without moving parts and sound can be cost effective and durable in 3 years and perhaps a bit less.

I'm looking at an "old" opened HD with a CD size platter but a capacity of about 250mb as I recall. This low density behemouth probably cost $400 or more in 95. I've never owned a car that new-yet that HD seems like the Ice Age..... Look at the diff in Burners now vs 5 years ago when a 4x CD-R/RW went for near $200. Now a Dual Layer 16x DVD burner,48xCD-R,with Burn Proof is under $60,and CD-R blanks cost less than the cases to put them in. Volume leads to efficiency and pays off R&D,while stimulating further tech leaps- Look at the difference between an Athlon Palomino and a new X2. The X2 is WAY quieter/cooler AND far more powerful at a similar price tag!