Postage Stamp-Sized SSDs On The Horizon

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.