04 Dec Intel and Micron want to bury the traditional HDD: SSD living
SSDs are pretty girls storage segment, but always had to recognize a clear disadvantage compared to hard drives of life: its small storage capacity. That could change after the alliance signed by Intel and Micron.
The agreement is aimed at one goal: to achieve high capacity SSDs that can compete in that paragraph with hard drives. Intel has announced that it will begin offering SSDs with NAND 3D in the second half of 2015 as part of its collaboration with Micron, and that could be the turning point of this market.
This advance will enable Intel and Micron NAND stack 32 layers of memory with 3 bits per cell which will lead to achieving 32 GB on a single mold (die) MLC. The combination of several of these chips in normal SSD or PCIe format units will achieve capabilities of several terabytes.
According to Bob Crooke, head of the group of non-volatile memories in Intel, this technology will allow access to 10 TB SSD in the next two years. In fact, it will also allow much smaller and offer more capacity drives, for example memory pen drives with 1TB of storage capacity.
One of the questions that follow present is the price that will these future units. Crooke declined to give forecasts on these hypothetical costs, but what is certain is that the cost of gigabyte SSD has continued to decline significantly in recent years. Still being higher than hard drives, the popularization and mass production of these units could lowering them even more remarkable.