Why Flash Drive Density Will Stop Growing Next Year

“Recently, Enterprise Storage Forum published an article by
Henry Newman in which he argued that lithography limits and disk
drive density are going to keep solid state disks (SSDs) from
replacing spinning disks. To help explain his argument, I’m going
to outline why one of the keys to this equation, SSD density, is in
grave danger of stopping next year.

“SSD Technology Review

“The SSDs that we’re using today are built on floating gate
transistor technology, illustrated in Figure 1 below from
Anandtech.

“Between the floating gate and the substrate is the tunnel oxide
– the barrier to the floating gate through which the
electrons “tunnel” into the floating gate. The transistor either
has electrons tunneled into the floating gate (indicating a logical
0) or does not have any electrons tunneled into the floating gate
(indicating a logical 1).”

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