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back to article Huawei: KRYDER STORAGE CRISIS is REAL and 'we’re working on it'

Huawei’s chief storage boffin says the company has looked at the looming crisis in storage technology with concern. Until 2010, the cost of storage per dollar had dropped exponentially. The decline has been dubbed the Kryder rate, or “Kryder’s Law”, a reference to an article in a 2005 issue of Scientific American of the same …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Kryder's "Law"

    I don't think it deserves that title when he only said it in 2005 and we diverged from it only five years after. Maybe "Kryder's Fallacy" would be more accurate?

    What I wonder is, how much did SSDs have to do with this? That's eliminated the high end disk drive market. There is a lot less future profit available to fund research that results in aereal density increases. Right about the time that GMR was starting to run out of steam, everyone knew that NAND would soon approach the densities required that would allow its use as a true storage tier, rather than a niche/botique option for special cases. The R&D money was poured into SSDs, and hard drive density increases have dimished because hard drives have only a low profit commodity market remaining.

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  2. Nigel 11

    Kryder’s Law isn’t a smooth curve but a superposition of S-curves representing each new storage technology

    Eh?

    Today's 5Tb disks are still recognisably the same as the 1Mb 16 inch platters of the early 1970s. Data written onto more or less homogeneous magnetic surface by a read/write head "flying" on a cushion of air.

    Yes, the design of the head in particular has gone through a series of new technologies, but nothing like as radical as what happened to electronics during that period. (Bipolar to MOS to CMOS, SSI to MSI to LSI to VLSI, exotics like Copper interconnects and Hafnium gates and fin-FETs).

    The breakdown in Kryder's law is for the same reason as the breakdown in Moore's law. Magnetic disks have hit the physical limits just as microelectronics has. In both cases the physical limits boil down to the fixed size and indivisibility of individual atoms. In one case, magnetic domains cannot get any shorter. In the other, transistor gates cannot get any thinner.

    I wonder if we will ever see BPM / HAMR disks for sale. Solid-state storage deleloping from 2D to 3D structures may be the real breakthrough. I don't think there's any near-term physical limit on how many bits of Flash memory can be stacked on the Z axis, whereas BPM and HAMR are one-time gains after which the same limits reassert themselves.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Moore's Law hasn't stopped yet, but when it does it will be due to cost for new fabs and mask sets, not physical limits. They have a clear path to go at least a decade longer, and during that decade would probably clear the path to go further.

      The problem is since they can't get new technologies like EUV or e-beam to provide the required throughput, and prolonging the lifetime of 193nm litho they have had to go to double and eventually triple/quadruple patterning of the critical layers to keep pushing to smaller sizes. Or use Intel's strategy of restricted design rules (which works for them, but not for a big foundry like TSMC) That will make the cost of mask sets prohibitive for all but the highest volume chips, and increase the size and cost of fabs due to the increased number of process steps.

      They aren't running into physical limits on hard drives either, they have ways of limiting the size of the magnetic domains like HAMR, but it will be more difficult to get that working since there is less profit to be used for R&D to bring it out of the lab and into large scale production.

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  3. YARR

    "....superposition of S-curves... Eh?"

    'twas explained in the earlier article:

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/10/kryders_law_of_ever_cheaper_storage_disproven/?page=2

    Good luck to Huawei if they can add a few more S-es, but like everything in this physical universe storage capacity can't keep growing exponentially.

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