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Phil.Gillaspy
The one sure prediction for memory is, if you make it, we will fill it.
Duane Benson
I think that the only accurate prediction relative to memory (processing memory ...
Silicon Valley Nation: The upside of gluttony
Brian Fuller
8/23/2012 1:22 PM EDT
What's a little easier to comprehend is this: That Wikipedia entry referenced above notes that in 2009 the web was roughly 500 exabytes, or half a zettabyte. In 2011, Seagate reporting selling a little more than 330 exabytes worth of drives. So bottom line: Consumption outpaces storage, pure and simple, whether it's music on your 16GB iphone or in the cloud.
That was the message this week from Sandisk's Kevin Conley, who blew a lot of smart minds here with the zettabyte reference during his kenote at the Flash Memory Summit. He tried his own context-setting by explaining that 2.7 zettabytes is like 9 million galaxies of stars. (Sorry, I have a hard enough picking out Taurus the bull some evenings). IDC forecasts total data storage to increase to more than 8 zettabytes by 2015.
In any case--and in any context--the ramifications are enormous for the solid-state storage industry--all storage media for that matter.
Crossover point?
I asked him afterward whether he thinks, despite the strides that flash memory makers have made over the past quarter-century, that flash memory will ever pass rotating media on a lower dollar-per-megabit basis.
"There may never be a crossover," acknowledged Conley, who serves as vice president and general manager for Sandisk's client storage solutions business unit. "But we've made great gains: Think about the 20MB drive from 20 years ago that cost $1,000. It now costs the equivalent of 2 cents today."
But if the price-per-megabit may never switch over, the value proposition for flash and solid-state drives has changed radically in recent years, he insisted. Rotating media has physical constraints, such as the need for a disk of a given size--that create a floor of about $35 to $45 per device, regardless of capacity. The flash floor is about half that, Conley said.
In addition, SSDs have been introduced into the data center to handle "hot storage" duties while HDDs have been shifted into backup roles. That and other architecture evolutions have dramatically reduced the cost of servicing a center, Conley said. A widely cited 2008 study using an HP DL580 G5 system (2.67 GHz, 16MB L2) pegged data center costs at $1.10 per transaction per minute (TPM). Three years later, a followup analysis using an HP DL380 G7 (3.46 GHz, 12MB cache) leveraging SanDisk SSDs pegged the cost at 65 cents TPM. (That study is referenced in this SanDisk presentation (slide 14)).
Into the cloud
At the client/PC level, the trend is clear. Various sub-notebooks and tablets leverage robust amounts of solid-state storage for quick boot times, and any big storage needs are offloaded easily.
"You no longer need terabytes of rotating storage. They're going to be stored in the cloud," Conley said. "120GB are about all you need to service the average PC today."
(It's no coincidence that SanDisk's sales sweet spot among PC OEMs runs from 128 to 256GB, but, hey, point taken).
"Flash memory is taking the PC and fulfilling its promise of being a highly interactive and responsive computing device," Conley said.
Those of us who watch the rainbow wheel whirl around and around on our old machines can only sigh.
Related stories:
-- 44 TByte flash array debuts at $3/GByte
--Silicon Motion introduces SATAII SSD controller
-- Optimizing PCIe SSD performance
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Bert22306
8/23/2012 4:01 PM EDT
Yes, but I think this could be a little misleading. Consumption is easily going to outpace storage, simply because a lot of what goes across the wire or the ether is never stored, and not meant to be.
The most obvious examples are any form of streaming media, or for that matter, broadcast radio and TV that preceded Internet streaming. All those "bits" of information sent to millions or billions of households were never stored, and still aren't now with streaming media.
But also consider just filling out forms on some "cloud server." Like, your bank, or your lawn service. The packets flowing back and forth between client and server mostly bounce the same information back and forth, only storing at the server a few entries the client sends in.
Just think about regular old face to face conversations. Imagine if they were quantified as bytes. I suppose some of them are stored in our brains, but most of them simply drift off to never-never land.
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AlPothoof
8/23/2012 6:45 PM EDT
"120GB are about all you need to service the average PC today."
And 640K is all the memory the PC will need, too.
Seriously, I know the next version of Microsoft Office stores data in the cloud by default and my son likes that (he's a student and most of what he does needs to be sent to professors) but I don't and the companies I work with like it even less.
So most of our data will be kept locally even if not directly on the PC.
But, hey, I've probably got more than 120MB of programs in my Program Files directory.
And then there's the size of the operating system itself...
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Duane Benson
8/23/2012 10:07 PM EDT
I think that the only accurate prediction relative to memory (processing memory and storage) is that people will want as much as they can reasonably afford to buy. There are a lot of different definitions of what "inexpensive" is, but everyone knows what a bigger number is.
If 500GB costs the same as 750GB, the manufacturer will sell the 750 because it has a bigger number. And software folks will find ways to fill it up.
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Phil.Gillaspy
8/28/2012 3:19 PM EDT
The one sure prediction for memory is, if you make it, we will fill it.
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