14 DAY TRIAL // Though NAND Flash memory has made a name for itself as the fastest storage solution currently in use, it might just be that Samsung has developed a technology that could make it look slow and weak.
Solid state drives are getting cheap enough to challenge the significantly more capacious hard disk drives, while flash drives are now an expected accessory for everyone.
Then again, since technology is always evolving, it is expected that even NAND Flash will eventually be surpassed.
In fact, if recent reports are to be believed, Samsung may have already come up with something, namely a technology that could leave NAND in the dust.
In other words, Samsung has created something that is to NAND what, to some extent, MRAM (developed by Toshiba and Hynix) is to DRAM.
ReRAM is a rewritable, nonvolatile type of memory that has a rewritability of 10 to the power of 12, or one trillion, times. This is an advantage of a factor of one million compared to NAND.
Meanwhile, switching time is as fast as 10 ns, very close to what DRAM of today can manage instead of the 0.1ms (for a block of data) that Flash commonly exhibits.
One can already start dreaming what it would mean for storage units to work thousands of times faster than today.
For those that want specifics, the Samsung technology uses, as resistivity-varying material, Ta2O5-x/TaO2-x laminated film.
Besides the above mentioned benefits, the abandonment of Ta205 in favor of Ta2O5-x also enables a lower power consumption.
Unfortunately, even though the ReRAM research is noteworthy, there is, at the moment, no way of knowing how long it will take for it to actually lead to the appearance of new and improved products.
Either way, one can be more than certain that years will pass before anything palpable is devised.