“Standard consumer SSDs will increase up to an astounding 10TB of storage, thanks to a new type of 3D NAND flash memory that Intel and Micron introduced Thursday morning,” Gordon Mah Ung reports for PCWorld.
“The two companies, longtime joint partners in NAND flash development, said the breakthrough isn’t to make larger flash chips, but thicker ones,” Ung reports. “Much like Manhattan, when you’re out of space, the only way to go is up.”
“Executives at the two companies said that by stacking the NAND they can greatly increase the capacity,” Ung reports. “Pack a bunch of those together, and the end result is a tripling of capacity over today’s drives, at least initially. For a standard 2.5-inch SATA drive that means up to 10TB of space; for the M.2 drive type used by most laptops, the 3D NAND will boost capacities up to 3.5GB [sic 3.5TB]… The chips are already sampling at both companies, and Intel said it expects to offer products for sale using the 3D chips in the later half of this year.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: With video and everything else getting larger, these types of storage breakthroughs are sorely needed. As always, they’ll be expensive at first, but prices will come down over time. Imagine a MacBook with a 3.5TB SSD on board!
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Bill” and “Dominick P.” for the heads up.]