NAND flash has at least another decade of life | Hacker News Reader

NAND flash has at least another decade of life

itworld.com

34 pointsjfruhlinger16 comments

Predicting the future in tech is a fools errand.

Ground and air transportation speeds haven't increased since the 60s.

"You're too cheap to fly faster"

https://medium.com/lift-and-drag/7885a299bca2

Top ground speed transportation has roughly doubled since the 60's. If Elon Musks hyperloop gets built, then you could see that become 3-4 times faster.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_speed_record_for_rail_vehi...

And there is of course the scramjet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramjet which set records in 2003 which is 10,000kph faster than the record set in 61.

Right, so: like he said.

Blue-sky concepts which even the inventor himself doesn't want a piece of aside, I don't think the scramjet qualifies as air transportation, unless transporting an unmanned aircraft counts.

I can't tell, are you agreeing or disagreeing? There were lots of predictions from the 60s that transportation speeds would continue to increase, so this would be a good example of how hard it is to predict technological advances.

But rotational harddrives probably will: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9227382/60TB_disk_dri...

Disc (yes, optical) media could also perhaps get in 1-6+TB range.

By disc media you mean optical disks? A hard drive is, at least to me, disc media.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_of_disc

See "disc vs disk"

I capture both worlds by spelling them disck.

Optical media could possible store 1000TB per dvd

http://phys.org/news/2013-06-storage-terabytes-dvd.html

>Flash memory isn't going to get any cheaper for another decade

That doesn't seem to be what the article is saying.

Exactly.

The article says that the cost of flash will stay at approximately 10x the cost of traditional hard disks. Given that traditional hard disks are expected to decrease in price, the title is not just misleading, it's flat out wrong.

This prediction does mean that it will decrease in price slower than it has in the past, but that's all.

Handy's prediction that prices will drop in 2015 when supplies increase seems more likely (although I suspect it could happen before then).

Apparently he started with this (its the last thing in the article):

"We had a period where no one was making money from 2011 to this year, so no one invested in capacity. Now demand caught up with capacity. So they are building capacity but that won't be fully ramped until 2015,"

And then added a bunch of other stuff talking about various factors. Everyone has known flash has issues in terms of 'how' it works hasn't changed a whole lot so it has been at the mercy of its minimum feature size. Hard disks keep finding new ways to record and read magnetic domains so they get past various 'limits.' The article implies, but doesn't state, that anticipation of some of these new kinds of flash will slow down the addition of new capacity.

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