Published in Cloud

Flash will be the storage of choice

by on15 May 2017


Claims NAND controller developer


Flash memory based solid state storage devices (SSD) are pushing hard disk drives out of the market and will replace them, according to the president of NAND controller developer Silicon Motion.

Robert Fan told New Electronics  that SSDs were taking over the whole category now and we’re seeing with Seagate and Western Digital that their hard disk market is declining.

Fan said flash moves the data quicker and more reliabily. Because it is not mechanically-based it has better durability to withstand shocks, high pressures and temperatures. He claims it consumes much less power.

Flash controllers will also organise the way data is stored to achieve ‘wear levelling’. The locations in a flash memory will gradually wear out with repeated write/erase cycles, so using the available memory cells equally is important to avoid premature failure.

Applying single- and multi-cell technologies in its products, Silicon Motion is also exploring 3D NAND. According to Fan. pictured left: “3D NAND is the latest generation of flash technology. It enables very high capacity and very low cost. All the NAND vendors – like Samsung, Toshiba – are moving towards supplying 3D NAND.”

While much has been written about the benefits of SSDs in enterprise applications, the technology is also finding uses in other areas. “One of our key growth areas in the past couple of years has been in the client SSDs,” Fan noted. Client SSDs are built for the consumer market, rather than for enterprise applications, and may provide fewer write cycles.

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