FAST Report: Flash to Run out of Gas by 2024

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A new report from UCSD and Microsoft Research casts doubt on the future of NAND Flash technology. According the to paper, the life and performance of flash will degrade to the point that it will no longer be a viable performance solution by 2024.

In this work, we present our empirical data collected from 45 flash chips from 6 manufacturers and examine the performance trends for these raw flash devices as flash scales down in feature size. We use this analysis to predict the performance and cost characteristics of future SSDs. We show that future gains in density will come at significant drops in performance and reliability. As a result, SSD manufacturers and users will face a tough choice in trading off between cost, performance, capacity and reliability.

Download the Paper.