Postage Stamp-Sized SSDs Coming in 2012

End-users are most likely more than aware of the fact that solid state drives are still a way off from becoming mainstream, even though they have significantly higher data-transfer rates when compared to hard drives. This lower popularity is mostly due to the fact that hard disks have larger storage capabilities and are a more mature technology than that of SSDs. Still, SSDs have steadily been filling the gap and it seems that this gap might disappear altogether in the not-so-distant future, if the work of a team of Japanese researchers is anything to go by. Led by Professor Tadahiro Kuroda, the group created a prototype of a postage stamp-sized SSD.

The Nikkei reports that the research team claims to have put together a technology that allows solid state drives to shrink considerably. The storage unit will supposedly be 90% smaller than current solutions. This would already be noteworthy, but the device will also, supposedly, be able to pack even 1TB of space in this stamp-sized form factor. Not only that, but the storage device will also see an added energy efficiency, namely of 70%.

The research team is made up of people from Toshiba and the Keio University of Tokyo. Under the guidance of Professor Tadahiro Kuroda, they were able to create the aforementioned prototype with 128 NAND flash memory chips and a controller chip. The unit is able to achieve a transfer speed of up to 2Gbps and, the team says, is based on radio communications. According to them, radio communication will ultimately lower the production cost of such SSDs. This means that, in addition to being capacious (1TB) and efficient, the new solid state drives will also be cheaper than competing HDDs.

Unfortunately, even though the researchers were able to patch together a working prototype, it seems that such a product won't become available in the very near future. The team expects the first such device to only come out during 2012.