Carzy Zarx’s PC Gaming Emporium - Catch Up on All the Latest PC Gaming Related News

[Pemalite]

JEMC said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

Of course they will get bigger. I'm fully expecting 200GB installations on the next gen AAA games, with up to 500GB in extreme cases.

Which will make download size explode, too. Hope you don't have restrictive data caps...

500GB?! You're insane .

Keep in mind that those games will also launch on consoles, and the PS5 only has 825GB of space (minus whatever the OS and system updates takes). They won't allow games so big.

Lots of investment has been done on the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X compression capabilities, textures tend to be highly compressible datasets.

Bofferbrauer2 said:

Certainly not.

My fear is more that SSDs are slowly hitting a brick wall with the miniaturization since smaller gates and higher amounts of states for the cells drastically reduce the life expectancy of the SSD. New techniques may be necessary to get around this, and those never come cheap. I mean, some QLC blocks have a life expectancy of a mere 100 erasures, which is getting ridiculously low now. And yet they are developing PLC now, so 5 layers of states and storage, at which point the number of rewrites for a block might drop to such lows as just 20.

Clearly, Flash is starting to show it's limitations. 

Companies like Intel are using floating gate for their NAND which hit a wall awhile ago... And other manufacturers like Samsung are using Charge-Trap which tends to be more durable as it doesn't destroy the oxide layer as readily as floating gate, basically the improvements on both are coming down to the materials and layers.
It made more sense to build chips on a larger process and just add more layers, but now we are hitting a layer wall, so now we are shrinking the individual layers.

But there is room for improvements after that such as Bandgap-Engineered Silicon–Oxide–Nitride–Oxide–Silicon or (BE-SONOS).. But the real successor to QLC will be Twin BiCS NAND.

Basically it's a semi-circular split floating gate and can push past the 4-bits per cell limitation that QLC imposes.

And you are right, the amount of rewrites for a block are reducing, but endurance for a drive stays roughly the same due to overall increases in capacity...
For example on a 128GB drive each cell would end up with 8x write cycles to hit 1 Terabyte. - But a 1024GB drive would only use 1x write cycles for 1 Terabyte.

Still, I got no issues using a QLC or TLC drive as long as she performs...