This article collects a number of interesting observations from the 2026 SNIA Storage Developers Conference (SDC).

Grant Mackey, from XCENTA had an interesting presentation on the uses of CXL. This included an interesting chart comparing the prices of DRAM versus NAND flash from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 and projected through Q4 2026 as shown below.

As shown from Q3 2024 to Q2 2026 the difference in the price of a GB of DRAM versus NAND flash has increased from 37X to 84X. This expands on a trend where NAND flash has also increased in price of storage capacity versus hard disk drives, HDDs, from about 5X to about 20X from Q2 2025 through Q2 2026 . It looks like the increase in storage/memory prices followed the memory/storage hierarchy, where DRAM increased the most, SSDs next and HDDs increased but at a lower amount, less than 50% from 2025 through 2026.

Grant also showed a slide (see below) showing the role of a CXL memory device with DRAM in front of NAND flash to expand DDR memory in a CPU system.

Mike Klemm, from Kioxia showed an interesting projection of bit demand from traditional applications, AI training and AI inference, showing inference bit demand growth of 56% cumulative annual growth rate, CAGR, between 2025 and 2031, and dwarfing the bit demand for the other workloads.

Mike also discussed some SSD use cases, including Near-GPU caching, as shown below, where small reads are served out of a local SSD.

He also briefly discussed NVIDIA CMX, context memory storage, and the role of PCIe 5.0 and 6.0 TLC NVMe SSDs to support content memory storage.

Abhay Kataria from Seagate Technology, spoke about HDD use in Object Storage Systems. The figure below shows object storage in HDDs behind SSD storage supporting data delivery to HBMs attached to GPUs.

Software plays a major role in managing a multi-technology storage system and he made a point that management software should take into account how best to use the different storage technologies. In particular, for HDDs, which are electromagnetic devices, large data transfers provide the fastest performance, as shown below.

In addition, he also said that management software needs to schedule time for regular background maintenance work, a good suggestion for any technology, to optimize performance when it is needed.

David Gerstein from Leil Storage talked about graceful degradation for QLC SSDs. He said that die and block failures in high-capacity QLC SSDs in unavoidable. Managing failing components has been done in the past with head depopulation in HDDs. This is done using host management with overprovisioning to provide redundancy using erasure coding.

Eric Hubbard, chair of the INCITS Cybersecurity and Privacy group spoke about how to live in the Post Quantum Crypto world. Quantum computing will be able to break traditional encryption technologies and has led to Post Quantum Cryptography, PQC, which is intended to be secure against a cryptanalytic attack by a quantum computer.

PQC standards are under development, but below is a list from NIST. He recommended organizations establish a quantum-readiness roadmap and engage with technology vendors to discuss their post-quantum plans. He also suggested creating migration plans for PQC which prioritizes the most sensitive and critical assets.

Finally, SNIA has had an active DNA Storage Alliance group and Vincent Franceschini from Biomemory and Co-chair of the DNA Data Storage Alliance spoke about the Alliance activities. Among the achievements of this group is a new SNIA Swordfish management draft and several advances, including Biomemory’s partnership with Scality in June 2026 to integrate DNA archives with enterprise S3/object-storage infrastructure for retention for up to 150 years.

The image below shows 2026 DNA Alliance plans for 2026. In addition to storage, there is also work on neural network computing using DNA.

The 2026 SNIA Storage Developers Conference included discussion on many storage topics, including SSDs, CXL, HDD, post-quantum encryption and DNA storage.