Yesterday, we talked about Seagate’s promising HAMR technology for hard disk drives (HDDs) and its ability to push HDDs into the hundreds of terabytes.

We also remarked at the obsolescence of NAND flash memory in SSDs thanks to Intel’s 3D Xpoint Optane SSDs. Now it seems, according to Toshiba at least, NAND flash still has a few tricks up its sleeve.

In order to reduce cost and improve capacity of traditional SSDs, Toshiba plans to make use of something they’re calling quad-level cell (QLC) and bit cost scalable (BiCS) as well as stackable 3D NAND flash memory.

At a recent event, reports Nordic Hardware, Toshiba announced their plans to make use of said technologies to push SSDs to 128TB in the coming years.

Toshiba’s QLC and BiCS SSD roadmap.

Toshiba has quite obviously not taken into account HAMR technology, otherwise their projected capacity for HDDs would be a heck of a lot higher, perhaps even surpassing SSDs along the way.

One thing to keep in mind is that even if SSDs surpass HDDs in capacity, they’re likely to cost a lot more, and we mean a lot.

Do not expect SSDs to drop below the price of HDDs anytime soon.

Source: KitGuru

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