1 TB in a stamp-sized SSD sounds too good to be true.
The Nikkei reports that a team of Japanese researchers have developed a technology that will help reduce the size of SSDs by more than 90-percent. This will make the drives cheaper to produce while boosting energy efficiency by 70-percent. The new technology should also help SSDs become the standard storage system in the near future, possibly even replacing current platter-based mechanical drives--at least for system booting.
Led by Professor Tadahiro Kuroda, the team is composed of researchers from Toshiba and the Keio University in Tokyo. The team has created a 1 TB SSD prototype the size of a small postage stamp, consisting of 128 NAND flash memory chips and one controller chip. The miniature storage device boasts transfer speeds of 2 Gbps, and also uses radio communications which will ultimately make it cheaper to manufacture.
Currently the team doesn't expect to see commercial versions of the product until 2012.
sounds fishy to me... what the heck does a device the size of a postage stamp need radio communications for, and how the heck does that make it cheaper to manufacture?
if not, noone will buy them
Just a flaming guess, but I interpreted that to mean that the (apparently stacked) chips would communicate with each other using a very low power local wireless protocol, eliminating the need to interconnect the chips. If the range of the transmission is more than a few millimeters, I would be surprised.
However, three months after these come out, there will be a Black Hat demonstration of reading the memory activity using a netbook and a parabolic reflector made from a soup can, from a distance of five kilometers, while the operator is blindfolded and drinking a beer.
One thing that could also be interesting is when manufacturers would create a SSD with just the memory, while leaving the controller on the mobo. This could reduce cost for SSD's, but also reduces performance.
This is probably the most innovative part of the new technology