Flash Industry Trends Could Lead Users Back to Spinning Disks

If you're looking to speed up your system using an SSD this might be of interest to ewe... then again, maybe snot!

If you already own an SSD produced in the last five years, you may want to hold onto it. Next generation products will shoot for the moon on paper but fall well short of leaving the atmosphere. For the last decade we've watched the technology progress, but at the same time, meaningful growth has slowed or stalled due to cost-saving measures in NAND and controller technologies.

Early adopters, along with data centers and enterprise customers, played a large role in funding nearly all of the last decade's NAND development. The decision to purchase these products was due to how dissimilar they were from HDDs in terms of performance and reliability.

Yet over the last two years, the trend has been to slow performance to reduce costs. The more the technology is neutered, the closer to hard disk performance we see. On the controller side we've seen the number of processor cores and channels from each controller to the NAND flash shrink. On paper the new flash is faster than the old flash, so it's possible to achieve the same performance with fewer channels, but the larger die sizes also give us less parallelization. On the flash side, the move to more cost efficient 3-bit per cell (TLC) has delivered less sustained performance for heavy workloads that take longer to complete. Those are the same workloads early adopters chose flash in the first place.

SLC buffers, user-data in DRAM, and other technologies have hid many of the shortfalls of modern low-cost SSDs from many people, but power users can spot the difference between older and newer products. During this time, you still had an option to purchase higher cost MLC-based SSDs even though the number of products had declined. In the trailing end of 2017, however, those products will virtually disappear and you'll be forced to seek out alternatives.

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http://www.tomshardware.com/news/consumer-optane-enterprise-...