Who doesn't love fast storage? In the "olden days", we had magnetic platter hard drives, and no one complained because we had no alternative. However, SATA SSDs completely redefined storage speeds for the masses, delivering up to thrice the performance of HDDs. Then came NVMe SSDs that took things to the stratosphere, packing almost 30 times the speed of SATA SSDs (with the best PCIe 5.0 SSDs)

It's natural to wonder what comes next for SSD technology. It turns out, there are already various promising developments in place that could provide insight into the future of SSDs.

Existing packing technology will improve further

V-NAND and BGA for the win

NAND is the flash memory used inside SSDs, and stores all your precious data. When manufacturers started packing more and more NAND cells close together to increase storage capacities in the same physical size, they found that NAND started behaving weirdly, losing its effectiveness. So, they came up with V-NAND or vertical NAND (or 3D NAND) to stack memory cells on top of each other, increasing storage density without making larger SSDs.

Another packing technology ideal for industrial and embedded use cases is Ball Grid Array (BGA), which results in extremely tiny SSDs in devices where space is a premium. Many ultra-thin notebooks and Apple devices already use BGA SSDs, which are really just a different form factor for NVMe SSDs. Vertically-stacked NAND and BGA SSDs will continue to improve and remain relevant for many years to come.

NVMe-over-Fabrics to revolutionize server storage

Move over NVMe-over-PCIe

The existing NVMe SSDs that we plug into M.2 slots are NVMe-over-PCIe SSDs, as they use the PCIe interface to communicate with the rest of the computer. Enterprise hardware already makes use of what is called NVMe-oF or NVMe-over-Fabrics which replaces PCIe with network interfaces such as Ethernet, InfiniBand, fiber, TCP/IP, and more. This allows an entire network to access the shared NVMe storage across larger distances.

NVMe-over-PCIe is typically limited to a single computer or host, whereas NVMe-oF allows multiple hosts to benefit from the enhanced speed and reduced latency of the NVMe storage pool. The latency overhead isn't a concern here, as only a few microseconds are added to the overall performance. The benefits, however, are immense — scalability, cost, and security.

NVME-over-CXL might replace consumer SSDs

NVMe-oC looks like the next big thing

CXL or Compute Express Link is a relatively new communication standard built over the PCIe interface, and lends itself beautifully to high-speed storage. Instead of using the regular PCIe bus, NVMe-over-CXL (NVMe-oC) SSDs use the CXL interface, a shared connection between multiple CXL-compatible devices such as CPUs and GPUs. Using a separate physical connector to link to the shared CXL interface, an NVMe-oC SSD can access higher bandwidth and a shared memory pool.

The latest CXL 3.0 interface supports up to 64 GT/s per lane, four times that of PCIe 5.0. Besides, due to CXL devices sharing memory, the need for data transfer over the interconnect is reduced significantly, improving performance. Companies like Samsung and SK Hynix have already developed CXL DRAM for use in enterprise solutions, and with time, this technology could come to consumer SSDs as well.

What's in store for gaming SSDs?

While the future looks exciting for SSD technology, what's in it for gaming SSDs? Will the benefits of higher bandwidth and lower latency translate to more responsive gaming? Technologies like DirectStorage are key to making full use of high-speed NVMe and other SSDs of the future. If game developers are able to optimize games from the ground up for next-gen SSDs, gamers will be able to truly benefit from the sophisticated connection interfaces and performance uplifts on the horizon.