NAND闪存的黯淡未来

这篇Paper名为The Bleak Future of NAND Flash Memory，也即NAND闪存的黯淡未来。写论文的家伙怎么也搞得像标题党似的。国内外的科技媒体对此文的论点都有转载。

论文摘要：

In recent years, flash-based SSDs have grown enormously both in capacity and popularity. In high performance enterprise storage applications, accelerating adoption of SSDs is predicated on the ability of manufacturers to deliver performance that far exceeds disks while closing the gap in cost per gigabyte. However, while flash density continues to improve, other metrics such as a reliability, endurance, and performance are all declining. As a result, building larger-capacity flashbased SSDs that are reliable enough to be useful in enterprise settings and high-performance enough to justify their cost will become challenging.

In this work, we present our empirical data collected from 45 flash chips from 6 manufacturers and examine the performance trends for these raw flash devices as
flash scales down in feature size. We use this analysis to predict the performance and cost characteristics of future SSDs. We show that future gains in density will come at significant drops in performance and reliability. As a result, SSD manufacturers and users will face a tough choice in trading off between cost, performance, capacity and reliability.

SSD确实存在着这些问题，不过仅一二十年来，工业界已经对此做出了逐步的改进，才有了SSD进入企业级存储的今天。SSD的后来者们应该也会经历十几甚至几十年的发展才能真正成熟起来。在这期间，厂商们还是大有所为，充分发掘其背后的潜力，发布足够多的产品。用户们也用担心，该用的时候还就得用，业务等不及。研究人员也不用闲着，帮着吹捧或泼凉水，想出各种理想或不理想的Idea，到处发Paper。

没事可以顺便看看建筑设计的创新：把阳台弄成个游泳池。https://plus.google.com/u/0/102365188638805021921，A 37-story residential skyscraper in Mumbai, India, called the Aquaria Grande Tower.