A year ago today Toshiba was announcing ¥26.17 billion in profits for the quarter. Today, just ¥1.25 billion or about $12 million. In addition to the $580 million hit on account of its withdrawal from HD DVD, Toshiba also saw a swift decline in flash memory prices. While bad news for Toshiba on all accounts, we consumers are basking in a market dominated by a single high-def optical disc standard and cheap NAND and DRAM pricing. Sorry Tosh, but you won't find any tears around here.

The alphabet soup of different flash memory technologies is already a little bewildering, but it looks like the latest entrant could end up being the most promising of all, with single chip storage capacities of 1TB expected within ten years. Called array-based memory, the tech has been under development at a company called Nanochip, Inc. for nearly 12 years, and it looks like the first working samples will go out next year. Although those first prototypes will have storage roughly equivalent to NAND flash at tens of gigs per circuit, the plan is to rapidly scale up to 100s of gigs and finally to 1TB on a single chip. Because the chips can be manufactured using conventional fabs and aren't subject to the same manufacturing constraints as traditional flash, they may also end up being far cheaper per gigabyte. The company is being funded by a number of prominent tech giants, including Intel, and says the tech can be used to improve everything from USB keys to SSDs to enterprise-grade servers -- wait, bigger, cheaper, and potentially better? Yeah, sign us up.

[Via Slashdot]

SSDs definitely seem like the boldest new frontier in computer electronics these days, and Intel, which lately has been making some solid developments in the NAND memory department, is apparently still on track to do that whole SSD thing they've been talking about. According to CNET, Intel's NAND marketing manager Troy Winslow supposedly said the company would be coming up with some 80 - 160GB capacity drives in Q2, and 128GB capacity drives in Q3. Sounds to us like someone got something wrong, but there's no denying Intel and its respective partners Micron and STMicroelectronics are out to make a dent in the hard drive market of tomorrow.

With the help of some of their new manufacturing processes, SanDisk just doubled the capacity of their existing iNAND flash drive to 16GB. No, you won't be slotting this bad boy into your laptop. Rather, it's an embedded storage solution with SD interface for mobile handsets and the like based on MLC NAND, the faster and more expensive slower and cheaper flavor of flash. Expected for sampling to OEMs/ODMs in Q2 with the iNAND 32GB version coming in the second half of the year.

Usually with SanDisk flash announcements we just list a new higher capacity and post a shot of a memory card with the new number on it, but this time around the announcements are little deeper: two new memory technologies. The first, which will go into production in March, is a 16-gigbit flash chip that contains three bits per cell, based on Toshiba's "3D" flash tech we heard about over the summer. The chip offers 8MB/sec write performance, but is much smaller than conventional MLC chips. Speaking of MLC, SanDisk also announced that it's moving forward on 43nm MLC fabrication, which will allow it to ship 32 gigabit flash chips in the latter half of the year. Either way, it looks like we're going to have a lot of memory cards with bigger numbers on them to post up soon, eh?

Read - 16-gigabit 3D chip
Read - 43nm NAND

How do 200MBps reads and 100MBps writes in a storage device sound to you? Pretty sweet if you ask us. That's the upper spec for Micron's new highspeed 8Gb (Gigabit not Gigabyte, kids) SLC NAND co-developed with Intel on a 50-nm processes node. Once slapped together in an SSD, you can expect performance to easily outshine any existing SSD or mechanical drive on the market while easily kicking the SSD bugbear -- random read/writes -- to the curb. The rub, of course, is that SLC NAND is more expensive than MLC so you can expect to pay dearly for that performance. Watch for the speedy Micron flash to pop in cellphones, camcorders, SSDs (and pretty much every portable consumer electronics device out there) sometime in the second half of 2008 -- sampling now to manufacturers.

We won't pretend to be experts in NAND fabrication so we'll keep this short. Toshiba just showed their 15-nm processes which allows for the production of 100Gbit NAND flash chips in 4 years time. That is, if they can develop the technology for manufacturing -- no easy task. Compare that to those 16Gbit chips manufactured from 50-nm and 52-nm processes due for release next year, and you'll understand why physicists are in such a tizzy over the announcement.

[Via Impress and The Inquirer]

128GB of SSD. You long for it, you need it, and with any luck you'll have it when Toshiba starts churning 'em out for production by May. The new 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch MLC NAND slabs with SATA interfaces will ship in three capacities: 32GB, 64GB, and the big daddy 128GB. The new SSDs are based on the new 56-nm processes announced back in January. Of course, with Toshiba and SanDisk bedfellows in flash we're also expecting a SanDisk announcement on the quick -- certainly no later than CES in early January. No prices announced, though we anticipate the year-over-year reductions to continue, right boys?

[Via Impress]

Everyone wants to be packing some of that sweet flash memory in their notebooks these days, but not everyone wants to shell out such high prices for such relatively measly capacities. Well along comes Santa Ana-based STEC Inc. with what it claims to be a breakthrough NAND technology that will allegedly slash the price of solid state drives down to just $2/GB within two years; specifically, the company says it has successfully leveraged so-called multi-level cell-based (MLC) NAND into SSDs with 90MB/s read / 60MB/s write speeds -- good enough to exceed platter-based hard drive performance at prices supposedly half of what they are today. STEC is currently shipping manufacturing samples between 32GB and an impressive 512GB (in a 2.5-inch form factor; the largest 1.8-inch drive is 128GB), although it remains to be seen how much of those savings will be passed along to the consumer when these eventually come to market.

While Toshiba (and SanDisk) and Samsung might be battling it out in the press for the world's fastest and highest-density NAND, they're actually good buddies behind closed doors. In fact, they've been partners in the Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology Corporation for years. Today they announced a deal to cross-license the rights to respectively produce, market, and sell Samsung's OneNAND and Toshiba's LBA-NAND memory chips. Each plans to release products next year based on the newly licensed technology of the other. The move should broaden the choice of suppliers to OEMs in a day where multi-sourcing reigns supreme. Yes, that's a good thing for us consumers.

[Via DigiTimes]

Check it -- we've got a new entrant in the ever-expanding solid state disc market, and it goes by the name Micron. The firm's first SSD lineup (dubbed RealSSD) will feature a native SATA II interface, a rugged, lightweight plastic casing, and suck down less than two-watts of power while active. Furthermore, the units will come in both 1.8- and 2.5-inch iterations, with a 32GB and 64GB flavor to be available in each size. The newly launched family is expected to slip into mass production in Q1 of next year, and on a related note, the 1GB to 8GB RealSSD Embedded USB range -- which is slated to ship en masse next month -- was also introduced. We know, you've hung around this long just to get the low down on pricing, but unfortunately, Micron has yet to dole out that oh-so-crucial information.

Flash memory just keeps getting bigger, faster and more irresistible -- and that's just the way we like it. Now, the Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFi) working group is announcing the availability of the 0.9 draft of the ONFi 2.0 specification to member companies, which is a tell-tale sign that the updated spec will be officially loosed in just two months. What's important here is the newly defined NAND interface, which promises to deliver up to 133MB/second compared to the 50MB/second that the legacy NAND interface is limited to. As if that weren't enough to get you all jazzed up, ONFi 2.0 will also be backwards compatible, and infrastructure is reportedly in place to "reach 400MB/second in the third-generation." And just think, soon you'll be chuckling at yourself for asserting that 133MB/sec was "quick" -- onwards and upwards, we say.

Sweet merciful god of gadgets, we just snagged one of Samsung's new 64GB SATA II SSD drives, fresh from the NAND oven. If the prospect of gifting your laptop a ridiculously fast, low power hard drive free of moving parts (read: the thing that causes drives to fail) and with a two million hour MTBF doesn't catch your fancy, you should probably stop reading right now: we're unashamed to say SSDs make us swoon. Unfortunately we've yet to slap this slab of flash into a real computer and do some testing, but you can expect to see some more coverage there in short order. Those that don't want to wait can snag their own as we speak, but Samsung isn't selling to end users, so you have to snag a full machine from an OEM (like Dell's M1330, for example) and take a $950+ hit to get it. More shots of this sucker below.

We're not sure what's more impressive here: the fact that Samsung has produced the world's first 30nm-class 64Gb (bit, not byte!) NAND chip or that they're now roping defenseless product waifs into hawking their silicon wafers. Nevertheless, we're looking at a serious jump in density in just 10 months. A maximum of 16 of the new chips can be combined for cost-effective 128GB (byte, not bit!) MLC NAND-based flash cards used primarily for data storage. Sammy's faster SLC based flash cards will still be the preferred choice when speed is of the utmost priority and cost isn't an issue. As such, Samsung also announced a 32Gb SLC NAND chip based on the same SaDPT (Self-aligned double patterning technology) manufacturing process. Sadly, we'll have to wait until 2009 for production to begin. Still, he looks happy dontchathink?

[Via AVING]

Those who live for nothing more than to cram their SSD to the brim with useless data, only to mass delete the bulk of it, rinse, and repeat, we've found the perfect drive for you. Hitachi ULSI Systems Co., a subsidiary of Hitachi, has reportedly "developed a solid state disk on which data can be overwritten 100 times more than is possible on a conventional product of that type." On the device, "data predicted to have a high overwrite frequency is stored on the DRAM and not sent to the flash memory, while information with low overwrite frequency is stored on the flash." Consequently, "overwrite frequency on the flash portion" is substantially less than that of traditional alternatives. According to the company, it will start shipping out samples next month, but there's no mention of a commercial launch date. [Warning: Read link requires subscription]