Solid state disk technology has been making incredible advancements these past few years, so in a way every year has been the year of the SSD. There are several signs pointing to 2016 being the big year though, the point in time where the cost and capacity of SSDs make them worth using for most tasks from high end workstations to your grandmother’s cheap laptop.
Here’s a glimpse at recent events that point towards 2016 being that big year for SSD storage.
2014 – ongoing
Toshiba and SanDisk team up to develop and manufacture 3D NAND flash technology by 2016, their new fabrication tech will allow much higher density.
SanDisk announces 4TB enterprise grade SAS SSDs, claims 8 TB and 16 TB road map for next few years.
March 2015
Intel and Micron team up, much like Toshiba and SanDisk, unveil new advancements in 3D NAND technology, promising an optimistic 10 TB SSD capacity in 2.5″ form factor in the near future. I doubt we will be seeing 10 TB SSDs by 2016 but the technological advances done here will probably lead to 2 and 4 TB SSDs being very common and cost efficient within 1 – 2 years.
May 2015
Fixstars announces 1, 3 and 6 TB SSD. These aren’t cheap, but that’s not the point. The point is that they exist, and if some manufacturer I haven’t heard of until earlier this year can pop out some 6 TB SSDs then you can bet the big names are working on some as well.
July 2016
Samsung announces very cost effective SSDs ranging from 120 GB to 3.84 TB capacities.
Dell to offer cost effective, all-flash storage arrays.
These are just some of the major events. I’m seeing news articles on my feeds every other day about some new SSD offering higher capacity, lower costs, higher performance or all three.
Granted many of these events are out of most consumers price range, and are primarily aimed towards to enterprise market, but this is how most technological advancements occur. Enterprise/Datacenter have a huge demand for high capacity flash storage, the extra cost doesn’t matter when you can reduce a rack full of spinning hard drives to a few rack units of flash storage, the space, electrical and cooling benefits are obvious.
The good news is once these technologies prove themselves in the enterprise markets the consumers get to start enjoying it soon after.
By mid to late 2016, 2 TB and possibly 4 TB SSDs will be similar in cost to today’s HDD equivalents on the consumer market.