SSDs haven’t found their way into the mass market yet, but a team of Japanese researchers is already trying to make them more worthwhile. The team claims it has developed a technology that helps to shrink the size of SSDs by no less than 90%, makes them cheaper and boosts energy efficiency by 70%.
The research group is comprised of people from a handful of different institutions, i. e. Toshiba or Keio University in Tokyo (where Professor Tadahiro Kuroda is the main person responsible).
The new technology makes it possible to produce 1TB SSDs that are as small as a postage stamp. The current prototype (pictured) is sized just like that and made of 128 NAND flash memory chips and one controller chip. It boasts a data transfer speed of 2Gbps and is based on radio communication, which (according to the researchers) leads to lower production costs.
A practical version is expected to be ready by 2012.
Via The Nikkei [registration required, paid subscription]
And Mr. Kuroda also has a bridge in Tokyo that he’d like to sell us.
Look, I’m as hopeful as anyone, but this just seems like an early April fools’ joke from Tokyo. 2Gbps over RF? 90% size reduction?
That would be a quantum leap, not an incremental step…
Quantum leap = Extremely small XD
A quantum leap would be between atoms.
2Gbps (about 200MB/s) is lower than current SSDs, and using 128 NAND chips to get there is just plain wastefull.
Even whitout ONFI you can get 160MB/s from 4 NAND chips. With ONFI 2.2 you can get 200MB/s from one NAND chip (or flash channel by interleaving LUNs).
[...] [From Coming soon: Postage stamp-sized 1TB SSDs] [...]
Btw, really good post. Waiting for your next one!
Well once they are on the store shelves I will pay atention.
hi there i want quad 1 terabyte ssd’s in my sony ps3 or ps4 hard drive too slow thats 4 terabytes of flash memory storage
@Lars
2 gigabits is exactly 256 megabytes, not around 200 megabytes