The Death Watch for Hard Disk Drive Technology Begins Now (Finally!)


Well, nothing is really mainstream until the non-technical crowd is ready to buy. And that isn’t going to happen until we start to see 128GB SSDs approach the $100 mark.

Thanks for Moore’s Law
Now, what’s cool about computer technology is that evolution occurs at a brisk pace. The newest crop of SSDs use what’s called a 35 nanometer fabrication process to make the flash memory chips used in the drives. That means that the transistors that comprise the chips are 35 billionths of a meter apart. And the spacing is already getting smaller. Intel and Micron have jointly built a new flash memory fabrication facility utilizing a 25 nm process. Chips from this venture are already being sent out to potential component manufacturers.

The expectation is that we’ll start to see SSDs using 25 nm chips this fall!

With a smaller process, a chip takes up less space and is therefore cheaper to manufacture. (In the semiconductor chip business, surface area is an immense factor in determining price in a competitive marketplace.)

Intel/Micron have so far demonstrated the ability to store 8GB of data on a single 167 square millimeter chip. So, today’s 32GB affordable drives could be manufactured using only 4 chips – which would take up about as much surface area as both of your thumb nails.

So, doing some geometry and other extrapolation means that in less than one years time, the $100 affordable drives could be storing at least 65GB – before factoring in the effect of economies of scale. Other flash memory manufacturers are also working on 25 nm technology. The new facilities from Intel/Micron and others will add output capacity to the world flash supply. (The old fashioned 32 nm chips will still be produced – adding to supply.) The combination of increased output and price competition means that we could be looking at over 100GB for $100 in 2011.

And that pattern will continue as new manufacturing techniques are used to decrease production costs and storage density.

So, what are my predictions? Let’s take a look year-by-year:

  1. 2010 – Budget conscious geeks looking for a desktop boot drive and Netbook users will find SSDs attractive
  2. 2011 – Casual laptop users (office users and those with a separate home desktop system) will enter the SSD fold
  3. 2012-2013 – Desktop replacement laptop users will start to find 500GB drives affordable
  4. 2014-2015 – Home Media Server and DVR users will round out the lot of SSD buyers
  5. 2015-2016 – With no more demand for mechanical drives, HDD will go the way of the floppy disk

Of course, for hedge fund managers with no budget limit, 2016 is here now. But for the rest of us, get your shovels ready!

Update 2010-03-23T22:01:29:
Looks like this story got posted to Slashdot! Over on Slashdot’s comment thread I saw an interesting comment from ArcherB:

To get back on topic, I see spinning drives as the new backup or large file storage medium. You boot off your SSD and keep most of your files there, but anything you want a backup copy of or anything large enough to not need fast access, like movies, pictures, and music get stored on the HDD.

That’s a very interesting thought. Many folks (usually business users these days) use tape backup systems to archive data from hard drives since tape is inexpensive. Now, the cost/terabyte for hard drive storage is fairly inexpensive. For example, I just checked Amazon and saw this Western Digital 1 TB drive for about $80.

Also, on Amazon, a 400GB LTO tape costs about $31.

So, 1TB on tape would cost only slightly less than HDD. That’s today’s prices. Plus, with tape, you need to buy expensive tape drives to use them. So, it seems to reason that ArcherB is correct, HDD technology could ave an extended life in the backup medium space.

But, perhaps the next question is: Why is anyone still using tape backup today?

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