Samsung plans petabyte SSDs within 10 years. This is 1,024 TB in old money, a very large amount of storage. This news comes as the SSDs available today are getting cheaper and cheaper.

According to A&SMag (opens in new tab) (via Tom's Hardware (opens in new tab)), Samsung plans to reach the 1PB goal through various advances. Normal node shrinkage will be part of the answer. So will increasing the number of flash chip layers to about 1,000. Currently, Micron and Samsung have 232 and 236 layers of NAND flash chips, respectively.

Further physical and packaging advances will also help increase density, but another really big driver will be bit density. Currently, commercial SSDs are available with up to 4 bits per memory cell, called QLC or quad-level cells.

The next step would be PLC or pentalevel cells storing 5 bits of data, and then HLC or hexalevel cells with 6 bits. Of course, increasing the bit density of a cell is a very complex process. [Current high-performance SSDs use TLC or triple-level cell NAND with 3 bits per cell. Therefore, eight different voltage levels must be used for a given cell to represent all possible data states. A hexalevel cell requires 64 voltage levels, while an 8-bit theoretical cell requires 256 voltage levels.

Of course, the greater the number of voltage levels, the more difficult it becomes to reliably read and apply those levels. Cells with increased bit levels wear out more quickly. Also, the time it takes to read and write these voltage levels is longer, which takes a big hit on performance; QLC drives have a bad reputation for performance, so we don't know how bad PLC and HLC drives are.

Even TLC memory is relatively slow, so all high-performance SSDs run a portion of their NAND flash in pseudo-SLC, or single-level cell mode, to improve throughput.

In any case, today's SSDs are getting cheaper and cheaper while Samsung researches ways to solve the problem of adding cell levels to NAND flash. According to research firm Trendforce (opens in new tab), flash memory will continue to get cheaper this year, with Trendforce predicting that consumer SSD prices will fall 13% to 18% in the first quarter of 2023 alone, and another 5% to 10% in the second quarter of this year

Trendforce expects prices for consumer SSDs to fall 13% to 18% in the first quarter of 2023 alone, and another 5% to 10% in the second quarter of this year.

Trendforce sees a strong likelihood of further price declines in the second half of this year. Currently, inexpensive 1TB M.2 drives can be purchased for under $50, and state-of-the-art PCIe 4.0 drives can be purchased for under $100 (open in new tab). These prices are expected to improve further.