Why SSDs Are Big And Cheap

eight terabytes of solid-state storage for less than 500 bucks back in 2009 you would have paid that much for a mere 32 gigs of space so why is it that you can get 250 times the space for the same price a mere 14 years later well there's a huge contributing factor you might not know about I'm talking about Nan cell performance you know nand is just a specific type of memory used in ssds that actually hold your data and a cell is the smallest unit of that memory each cell holds a tiny bit of data between one and five bits each meaning you'd need several cells just to store a single letter and exactly how many bits a cell can hold has become a crucial differentiator when buying an SSD you see the more bits a cell can hold the higher the capacity of the drive at the same cost but there's a trade-off more bits per cell also means less longevity and less speed in other words the drive will wear out fast these things happen because more bits are written overall to each cell shortening their lifespan and the additional bits means it takes longer for the drive to figure out exactly what data needs to read from or be written to each cell this higher data density also means that the error rate can increase this is because temperature fluctuations can cause electron leakage in tightly packed cells so the controller chip of the drive has to perform more error correcting functions slowing the drive down even more come on but spoiler alert using more bits per cell is the primary way we're getting bigger cheaper drives so how the heck are we making up for their speed shortcomings we'll tell you right after we think delete me delete me is a solution for the increasing issue of personal information being easily shared online without consent you can find hundreds of online profiles sharing your personal information with a simple Google search which can lead to annoying Robo calls and scam emails delete me software and team of experts can remove this information in just minutes compared to the hours it would take to do it manually on average delete me removes over 2 000 pieces of data for a customer in their first two years so if you want to get your personal information removed from search results on the web go to join deleteme.com techwiki and use code techwiki for 20 off one very common method is caching which can be done in two ways one by using high speed dram on the SSD similar to what you'd find in your main system memory or two by treating a small portion of the drive as fast one bit single level cells or slc's by only writing one bit to each cell even if it can hold more I can do more coach put me in for operations that can be completed in short bursts the SSD will make use of one of these kinds of cash to keep speeds High data transfer rates only drop if large amounts of data have to be moved resulting in the cash filling and the drive having to fall back onto slower mlc TLC or qlc sells that's short for multi-level triple level and quad level respectively which can hold two three or four bits a piece and some lower end drives even use some of your PC's main memory as cash to leverage the benefits of faster memory without adding cost to the drive itself another strategy is simply to stack nand cells on top of each other to increase data density rather than going to a higher and slower level of cell this has been heavily marketed by Samsung in particular as vinand technology where the v stands for vertical as in sick vert Brew but how far can we go in terms of cramming more bits into one cell while still keeping speeds reasonable well it looks like PLC or Penta level cell ssds are on their way and might appear in 2025 but as you can probably figure out each time you add another bit you see more and more of a diminishing return in terms of performance overhead and relative capacity resulting in PLC only giving you a 25 increase in storage and because of the complexity inherent in increasing capacity up to 5 bits per cell the drives will need new controller chips hence the delay in getting PLC ssds to Market and once they do arrive they might not be all that great for folks who need to write to them often such as content creators or Gamers who frequently change of the titles stored on their local drives that's the longevity concern we touched on earlier which unlike speed may not not be figured out by the time PLC drives hit store shelves but still PLC nand should be a way to store unprecedented amounts of data cheaply unless you're willing to go back to Old School mechanical hard drives I do kind of miss little click-clack noises they'd make oh my gosh the video's over thanks for watching like the video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it check out our other videos comment below with video suggestions and don't forget to subscribe and follow I don't know if you did that last time I'm watching

Channel: Techquickie

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Length: 5min 5sec (305 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 09 2023