At Samsung Tech Day 2022, Samsung unveiled its roadmap for the SSD ecosystem, and it promises significant progress. The company plans to “reach over 1,000 layers” in its state-of-the-art NAND chip by 2030, though it did not say whether that would apply to consumer products.

By comparison, earlier this year SK Hynix and Micron announced the launch of 238-layer and 232-layer products, respectively, which should, on paper, dramatically lower the cost per terabyte of SSD drives. However, it should be noted that this will also depend on supply and demand in the global market. The current economic situation in the world may force companies to reduce research and development costs and increase the intervals between product releases.

A larger number of layers means not only cheaper products, but also higher data storage density. Currently, the world’s largest solid-state drive is a 3.5-inch 100TB model from Nimbus Data, which uses a 64-layer MLC chip. At the same time, a 1024-layer TLC/QLC chip would accommodate 16 times as many layers, making a 1PB (1000TB) SSD quite realistic by the end of this decade.

It is worth noting that Seagate plans to release a 100 TB hard drive by 2030, while the current maximum capacity (as of October 2022) is 26 TB. 30TB drives are likely to become flagship offerings in 2023.

At the same event, Samsung announced that 1TB TLC V-NAND drives will be available to customers by the end of 2022, while the next generation of TLC T-NAND – most likely 2TB capacity – will be available for mass sale around in 2024. Following this trajectory, 4TB, 8TB, and 16TB NAND chips could hit the market in 2026, 2028, and 2030, respectively.