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Joel Weiss
May 8 2007 4:30PM
How We See CE
Industry leaders, moderated by EDN Senior Technical Editor Brian Dipert,
share their thoughts on consumer electronics: past-event post-mortems,
current developments and future trends.
When it comes to hard drives and solid state (flash)
memory, can you see the future? I think the future is cooperative and
collaborative; in other words, we’re going to move beyond the past
competition between HDD and SSD to a more cooperative and collaborative
environment. The reason for this is simple—people have a range of
storage needs, and different storage needs create different
requirements. The digital lifestyle has created a greater demand for
storage devices in general as we desire to move information or content
from our offices to our homes, to our cars, and to our handheld devices.
Some of these devices require storage that exhibits
extremely fast input /output times (i.e. nanoseconds) to store and
retrieve information but needs only relatively small capacities, and
price and volatility are also less of an issue. Examples include DRAM
for PCs. Other devices' requirements call for huge storage capacities,
where access speeds are of the order of milliseconds to store and
retrieve information, but where price, reliability, and volatility are
key. Examples include hard disk drives for PCs, home video recorders,
servers, back-up devices and even tape storage.
Other devices' storage needs lie in-between these two
sets of extreme requirements. Flash memory has a lot going for it—it can
be small, lightweight, consume less power than hard disk drives and its
data can be read very fast....although write speeds are often slower
than those of hard drives. This is a great form of storage for cameras,
MP3 players, thumb drives, etc. But on a per-GByte basis, flash memory
is much more expensive than hard drives, costing up to 8 times more on
the wholesale level. This higher price is also reflected on the retail
level—as I write this, Dell has introduced an option for a 1.8” 32GB
solid state drive (SSD) from SanDisk in the Latitude D420 ultra-mobile
and D620 ATG semi-rugged notebooks. The added price over the 30 GB HDD
is $549!
There will be some people who are willing to pay more
for less capacity just to enable decreased boot time by up to 34
percent, according to Dell, versus a standard hard drive. Conversely,
there are many people who would prefer an iPod-type device with as much
storage capacity as possible to carry large photo albums, videos, and
music, and who don’t want to pay a premium for the device. For these
requirements, a hard drive-enabled device is very desirable. According
to most analysts, hard drives are expected to retain the key price
advantage over flash memory for the foreseeable future.Hard drives are
also expected to retain an advantage in storage capacity measured in TBytes
(a terabyte equals 1000 GBytes).
Indeed, hard drive technology has advanced
significantly every year for its 50 years of existence. Storage capacity
(density) has increased annually at a rate of between ~30% and >100%,
and looks to continue this pace at 30-50% per year based upon new
technologies on the horizon, including HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic
Recording) and Bit-Patterned Media. Along with these improvements, disk
drive reliability and quality have also dramatically improved, as
measured by MTBF (mean time between failures) and AFR (annualized
failure rates). These improvements have enabled companies like Seagate
and Western Digital to extend their warranties to 5 years–often longer
than the warranted life for the typical consumer products in which they
operate!
Flash memory technology will continue to improve as
well. Current flash memory (NOR and NAND – both SLC and MLC) is
benefiting from semiconductor fabrication techniques that yield
geometries and line widths down to about 50 nanometers in size. These
critical dimensions will continue to shrink over time, extended by
changes in materials, processing and structures. Ron Dennison, Principal
Consultant with Research Development Consultants, Inc, told me in a
recent conversation that if new technologies are required, there are a
number of follow-on solid state memory candidates (Phase Change, Carbon
Nano-Tubes, R-RAM, Spin-RAM, etc.) waiting in the wings with the
projection of extension to perhaps 5 nm. Every one of these technologies
will require a significant amount of time to mature into products due to
the nature of the semiconductor process business.
Combining flash memory's features with a hard disk
drive into one package, called a hybrid drive, makes a lot of sense for
some applications, as it captures a broader set of key needs, and will
likely find its place in the overall storage hierarchy. More generally,
hard drives and flash memory can be complementary rather than
“cut-throat” competitive. As more and more of us carry around increasing
amounts of digital content, we store that content on hard drives. The
hard drive remains the primary storage option even as we use flash
memory for more portable devices. It’s been estimated that it takes six
hard drive-based storage systems to deliver content electronically to a
hand-held device. So looking forward, I see a continued need for a
synergistic approach to hard drives and solid state storage.
Joel Weiss
IDEMA
