Samsung teases petabyte SSDs as today's drives just keep getting cheaper and cheaper
Samsung has plans for petabyte SSDs within 10 years. That's 1,024TB in old money, people, and a whole lotta storage. The news comes as SSDs you can buy today just keep getting cheaper.
According to A&SMag(opens in new tab) (via Tom's Hardware(opens in new tab)), Samsung will achieve the 1PB target through a range of advancements. Your usual node shrinks will be part of the answer. So will increasing the number of layers in its flash chips to around 1,000. Today's NAND flash chips top out at 232 and 236 layers from Micron and Samsung respectively.
Further physical and packaging advances will help improve density, too, but another really big driver will be bit density. Currently, commercial SSDs are available with up to four bits per memory cell, known as QLC or quad-level cells.
The next step would be PLC or penta-level cells storing five bits of data and then HLC or hexa-level cells with six bits. Of course, increasing cell bit density is a very complex process.
Current high-performance SSDs use TLC or triple-level cell NAND with three bits per cell. That requires the use eight different voltage levels in a given cell to express all the possible data states. A hexa-level cell would require 64 voltage levels and a theoretical cell with eight bits would need 256 voltage levels.
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Of course, as the number of voltage levels goes up, so does the difficulty in terms of
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