Are SSDs doomed? Researchers say "yes" -- by 2024

Here's something to throw a monkey wrench into that whole "SSDs are the future of storage" theory. Researchers from the University of California, San Diego have discovered that shrinking solid-state drives results in severe enough performance degradation that they doubt the flash-based storage will have much of a future once the manufacturing process gets down to 6.5nm.

The scientists recently shared research they did on 45 different flash chips in various sizes, which showed that latency and error rates are sufficient enough that when they extrapolated the results to 2024 -- when SSD drives are expected to be produced at 6.5nm -- they question the drives' viability. As more capacity is squeezed into the chips, the findings show, bandwidth suffers, whether using SLC, MLC, or TLC flash.

The researchers did not use the custom flash controllers that manufacturers have developed to overcome some of these deficiencies, so it's conceivable that technology could be created to compensate for this expected degradation in the decade before the end is foreseen. Still, the findings confirm long-standing concerns about SSD reliability that have helped limited the technology's mainstreaming (though higher prices are obviously the biggest culprit).

Have concerns about performance degradation kept you from purchasing a solid-state drive? Are you worried about SSD's future as a storage medium? Let us know your thoughts in the Talkback section.

[Via Computerworld]