Jim Handy, General Director, Objective Analysis, is our long, time goto guy on SSD and Memory Technologies and we were both at FMS (Future of Memory and Storage – new name/broader focus) 2024 conference last week in Santa Clara, CA. Lots of new SSD technology both on and off the show floor as well as new memory offerings and more.

Jim helps Jason and I understand what’s happening with NAND, and other storage/memory technologies that matter to today’s IT infrastructure. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

First off, I heard at the show that the race for more (3D NAND) layers is over. According to Jim, companies are finding it’s more expensive to add layers than it is just to do a lateral (2D, planar) shrink (adding more capacity per layer).

One vendor mentioned that the CapEx Efficiencies were degrading as they add more layers. Nonetheless, I saw more than one slide at the show with a “3xx” layers column.

Kioxia and WDC introduced a 218 layer, BICS8 NAND technology with 1Tb TLC and up to 2Tb QLC NAND per chip. Micron announced a 233 layer Gen 9 NAND chip.

Some vendor showed a 128TB (QLC) SSD drive. The challenge with PCIe Gen 5 is that it’s limited to 4GB/sec per lane and for 16 lanes, that’s 64GB/s of bandwidth and Gen 4 is half that. Jim called using Gen 4/Gen 5 interfaces for a 128TB SSD like using a soda straw to get to data.

The latest Kioxia 2Tb QLC chip is capable of 3.6Gbps (source: Kioxia America) and with (4*128 or) 512 of these 2Tb chips needed to create a 128TB drive that’s ~230GB/s of bandwidth coming off the chips being funneled down to 16X PCIe Gen5 64GB/s of bandwidth, wasting ~3/4ths of chip bandwidth.

Of course they need (~1.3x?) more than 512 chips to make a durable/functioning 128TB drive, which would only make this problem worse. And I saw one slide that showed a 240TB SSD!

Enough on bandwidth, let’s talk data growth. Jason’s been doing some research and had current numbers on data growth. According to his research, the world’s data (maybe xmitted over internet) in 2010 was 2ZB (ZB, zettabytes = 10^21 bytes), and in 2023 it was 120ZB and by 2025 it should be 180ZB. For 2023, thats over 328 Million TB/day or 328EB/day (EB, exabytes=10^18 bytes).

Jason said ~54% of this is video. He attributes the major data growth spurt since 2010 to mainly social media videos.

Jason also mentioned that the USA currently (2023?) had 5,388 data centers, Germany 522, UK 517, and China 448. That last number seems way low to all of us but they could just be very, very big data centers.

No mention on the average data center size (meters^2, # servers, #GPUs, Storage size, etc). But we know, because of AI, they are getting bigger and more power hungry,

There were more FMS 2024 topics discussed, like the continuing interest in TLC SSDs, new memory offerings, computational storage/memory, etc.

Jim Handy, General Director, Objective Analysis

Jim Handy of Objective Analysis has over 35 years in the electronics industry, including 20 years as a leading semiconductor and SSD industry analyst. Early in his career he held marketing and design positions at leading semiconductor suppliers including Intel, National Semiconductor, and Infineon.

A frequent presenter at trade shows, Mr. Handy is known for his technical depth, accurate forecasts, widespread industry presence and volume of publication.

He has written hundreds of market reports, articles for trade journals, and white papers, and is frequently interviewed and quoted in the electronics trade press and other media.

He posts blogs at www.TheMemoryGuy.com, and www.TheSSDguy.com

John Trafton, "Movie-Made Los Angeles" (Wayne State UP, 2023)