Dipartimento di Ingegneria, Università degli Studi di Ferrara, Ferrara, Italy, CEA, LETI, Minatec CAMPUS, Grenoble Cedex, France, University Grenoble Alpes CEA-CNRS, SPINTEC, Grenoble Cedex, France

The state-of-the-art solid-state drives (SSDs) now heterogeneously integrate NAND Flash and dynamic random access memories (DRAMs) to partially hide the limitation of the nonvolatile memory technology. However, due to the increased request for storage density coupled with performance that positions the storage tier closer to the latency of the processing elements, NAND Flash are becoming a serious bottleneck. DRAM as well are a limitation in the SSD reliability due to their vulnerability to the power loss events. Several emerging memory technologies are candidate to replace them, namely the storage class memories. Phase change memories and magnetic memories fall into this category. In this work, we review both technologies from the perspective of their possible application in future disk drives, opening up new computation paradigms as well as improving the storage characteristics in terms of latency and reliability. © 1963-2012 IEEE.

Applications, magnetic memories, magnetic random access memory (MRAM), phase change memories (PCMs), solid-state drives (SSDs)

Applications, Drives, Flash memory, Flash-based SSDs, Magnetic devices, Magnetic storage, Magnetism, Mathematical programming, Memory architecture, MRAM devices, Nonvolatile storage, Phase change materials, Phase change memory, Random access storage, Reliability, Storage (materials), Magnetic memory, Magnetic random access memory, Non-volatile memory, Random access memory, Solid state drives, Dynamic random access storage