With the arrival of 3D NAND about a decade ago, the storage capacity of solid-state drives has been increasing rapidly, and the per-GB price has been

SSD capacity could quadruple by 2029 — 8Tb NAND will bring big and affordable SSDs to the market

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2024-10-07 07:30:02

With the arrival of 3D NAND about a decade ago, the storage capacity of solid-state drives has been increasing rapidly, and the per-GB price has been decreasing steadily. It is why the vast majority of client PCs use SSDs these days. IEEE believes this trend will continue in the coming years, increasing SSD storage capacity to at least quadruple by 2029.

The reason 3D NAND has been increasing capacity is multifaceted. On the one hand, the number of active NAND layers has increased over the years, and on the other hand, the number of bits stored per NAND memory cell has increased from two to three (triple-level cell, TLC) and four (quad-level cell, QLC). Both innovations have happened over time and were meticulously calculated to achieve economic targets regarding per-TB costs.

We live in 2024. 2Tb QLC NAND memory devices are readily available to enable some of the world's best mainstream 2TB SSDs, which gives them 2TB of raw storage space. IEEE's roadmap pins 4Tb 3D NAND devices to 2027, doubling the capacity for mainstream SSDs. Then, the capacity is expected to quadruple in 2029 as the industry migrates to 8Tb NAND memory devices. That given, expect the capacity of mainstream SSDs to quadruple by 2028, though we are speculating.