Comments on: Researchers See Gloom And Doom For SSDs–Shortsightedness Never Ceases To Amaze

By: Mfilagan

Mfilagan — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 17:37:00 +0000

An interview with Fujitsu CTO Dr Joseph Reger mentions Phase Change Memory (PCM) as a replacement for flash. Check out original URL:https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/08/reger_on_flash/

By: Scottamoulton

Scottamoulton — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 05:08:00 +0000

I think the point is that NAND is getting worse as it gets larger, so there is no where to go from here. The tech has existed since 1984, its not new, but it is getting worse as we create newer versions.

By: Zaxx

Zaxx — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 02:49:00 +0000

Seems they don’t have a realization of what ‘Solid State’ means. Also, the study name should have said ‘…for NAND based SSDs…’. I agree…huge waste of grant money.

By: paul alcorn

paul alcorn — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 23:58:00 +0000

When I read this whitepaper a few weeks ago (Usenix released all of the whitepapers to us before the conference) I was amazed that they were quoting ECC as being a major inhibitor of progress with regards to latency. With solutions such as CLEARNand from Micron bringing ECC on-die with the NAND, these issues are already being addressed at the base level of the architecture itself. Removing ECC from the processing overhead yields tremendous results going forward. That was not taken into account for this study, yet this relatively ‘new’ tech is already being fielded. They even refer in the whitepaper as ECC being handled by the controller incurring latency, when ECC is already being removed from the controller!
Another obviously overlooked aspect is signal processing. They make absolutely no mention of the increasing viability of signal processing and its effect on ‘cleaning up’ data to alleviate many of the issues that they are citing as detrimental to latency.
Anobit and others are pioneering this work, and the early signs of success are already being seen simply by the fact that these companies are being snapped up right and left, as Anobit was by Apple. Apple specifically went after Anobit for the signal processing capabilities.
Basically, they are inferring that if ABSOLUTELY NO further technological advancements are made, and if we ‘unthink’ and roll back a few already existing technologies that are ignored in the study, then NAND will cease to be viable.
LOL. a joke of a study.
Sure greater things will come along, but NAND is like HDD…it isnt going anywhere for a lonnnnggg time. it will have its place in the storage world for a much longer time than this incomplete study asserts!

By: Daraby02

Daraby02 — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 22:30:00 +0000

Very Shortsighted in the fact it quoted the end of ssd drives instead of the use of Nand flash memory.