TECHWEEK
About ten years ago, SSDs seemed like something incredible and very expensive, but today a 1-4 TB SSD costs quite reasonable money. And manufacturers, of course, do not plan to stop there – yesterday, March 3, Pure Storage officially announced that in the near future the amount of memory in solid state drives should increase significantly. The company’s specialists are confident that drives with flash memory modules will “grow” six times in volume in a few years, reaching 300 TB. However, Pure Storage itself has nothing to do with this, because the increase in memory capacity depends solely on memory chip manufacturers.
The company said that in the near future, it is expected to increase the recording density of 3D NAND due to an increase in the number of layers and other technology improvements, due to which the manufacturer of memory chips will be able to achieve a significant increase in storage capacity. And, best of all, this applies not only to the corporate sector, data centers and other similar areas, but also drives for home PCs. The company is confident that in the coming years, SSDs in gaming and work computers will allow you to store insane amounts of data for quite reasonable money. However, the process has already, relatively speaking, been launched – the same Pure Storage already has corporate drives for 24 and 48 TB.
Pure Storage engineers believe that there are currently several ways to increase the capacity of modern SSDs by six times in three years – the task is certainly not an easy one. The most obvious way, of course, is to use more sophisticated 3D NAND chips. Currently, the market uses 3D NAND drives with the number of layers from 112 to 160, but the company is confident that in the next five years the number of active memory layers will increase to 400-500. Accordingly, the available volume of each drive will also increase five times, allowing the implementation of models in the same user sector not for 4 TB, but for 20 TB.
Of course, the most impressive growth in memory capacity will be within the corporate sector – Pure Storage explained that it is their patented DirectFlash Module technology, which is used in data centers, that will allow 300 TB drives to be introduced by 2026. It will not work to use them at home, because they are created with a special interface, a memory controller and are suitable for use only in certain servers, but if the volumes grow so catastrophically in the corporate sector, then ordinary users will also experience all the benefits of new SSDs.
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