Intel and Micron will ship 25nm flash memory in the second quarter of this year, which in turn should finally mean cheaper SSDs for everyone. Yay.
Intel’s existing multi cell X25-M and X18-M models are 32nm. This new shrink enables much greater capacity (8GB NAND measuring just 167 x 167mm) and devices will follow version 2.2 of the Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI) specification.
With most of the original issues sorted out (or worked around) and the introduction of TRIM, it sounds like SSD might finally start becoming common place in desktops (but I think laptops will see it first).
2 thoughts on “Cheaper SSDs on the way thanks to new 25nm process”
I suspect TRIM won’t help that much – it’s not a queueable command and so is pretty suboptimal, especially as some SSD’s can take hundreds of milliseconds to process it.. 🙁
For more info see the excellent LWN article on “The trouble with discard”.
Oh.. thanks for that link. So it looks like we still have to backup, zero, restore every now and then to maintain speed of the SSDs.