Flash has had a great run, but scaling of conventional planar NAND memory is reaching the end of the road. Fortunately there's a new route. At a chip conference this week Samsung and Micron revealed how 3D NAND has put flash scaling back on track.
SanDisk announced today a new line of SSDs that not only offer larger capacities but, according the company, are twice as fast as competing SSDs that have hit the market in the past year (which are themselves already significantly faster than standard hard drives on many tasks).Intended as the hard disk drive replacements in laptops for consumers and business users, the G3 series SSDs will be available at 60GB ($149), 120GB ($249) and 240GB ($499) capacities.
Samsung announced today that it has begun manufacturing 64GB and 128GB SSDs based on a less-expensive type of NAND flash known as MLC. The company also said it was still on track to deliver a 256GB version by the end of this year.