This month a major milestone was reached in the world of solid-state storage. For the first time, the capacity of an SSD was greater than that offered by a hard drive. The biggest hard drives on the market today are 10TB, but Samsung has achieved a 16TB SSD. According to Toshiba, that storage divide is going to grow massively over the next 5 years.
The 16TB SSD is a significant achievement not only because of the huge storage capacity, but because the SSD retained its 2.5-inch form factor. Anything above 2TB in a hard drive and you’re looking at a 3.5-inch drive. And the size of the storage component increasingly matters when you consider consumers continue to move away from desktop PCs and over to Ultrabooks, tablets, and smartphones. The same is true in data centers where space is always at a premium.
This is a comment made by Nobuo Hayasaka, managing executive officer of Toshiba Corp and senior chief engineer of its Semiconductor & Storage Company, in a speech delivered at "SEMI Members Day Tokyo," which SEMI Japan organized August/2015.
Currently, the maximum capacity of an HDD whose disk is 3.5 inches in diameter is 10 Tbytes, but it is expected to increase to 20-40 Tbytes by 2020, Hayasaka said.
On the other hand, the maximum capacity of an SSD whose size is the same as that of a 3.5-inch HDD has already reached 16 Tbytes, which is larger than the maximum capacity of a 3.5-inch HDD. It will increase to 32 Tbytes by 2016, 64 Tbytes in 2017 and 128 Tbytes in 2018, Hayasaka said.
It is expected that the capacity of SSDs will increase with an accelerated rate even after 2018.
From: Geek
