We have broken the $ 100 per TB Cost point for Flash SSD Drives. 500MB /sec R/W performance across a 6GB/sec Physical interface is typical.
Table Above: IDC; DRAM eXchange, Wells Fargo Securities, thru 2012-18.
The Cost / TB remains remarkably on-track, with NAND Spot prices of < $12/TB in January 2022.
I’ve recently seen 1TB USB 3.0 Flash memory Drives for $86 on Amazon. These devices can do 300-400 MB/sec R/W operations. That’s a retail, single quantity price. You need only a fraction of this to support the cached SVoD applications described here. 1TB represents perhaps 200Hrs of 4K video.
Last year, I purchased this 256GB device for under $40.
Over the past few years, the NAND Flash industry has gone through two major shifts in technology:
- The movement from 1 to 2 to 3 bits per cell. This directly increases bit density and capacity.
- The move from planar flash, to variants of 3D stacking.
These architecture changes, along with lithography shrinkage, are clobbering costs, allowing speed and capacity to increase.
Extrapolating the cost trend line implies that the cost of memory will go to zero within 2 years. Ha! Clearly that can’t really happen. Still, given the above, we might reasonably expect high speed Flash memory to break $10/TB sooner than we might otherwise expect.
Hybrid VoD 