Flash memory continues to shrink in size and grow in capacity.
Hard disk drive technology continues its inevitable march toward
greater areal densities, and hybrid drives are being purchased
in greater numbers. Hewlett-Packard is busy at work on a new
type of storage, one based on fancy little things called
memristors, which may hit the market in the mid-term. There's a
lot happening with solid state storage, and a lot more set to
happen—but some serious problems need to be solved first. It's
getting small in here For electronics, smaller is almost always
better. Moore's Law—which says that the amount of transistors
one can cram into a given amount of space tends to double about
every eighteen months—still holds roughly true for NAND flash.
SSDs based on a 25nm or 20nm manufacturing process are common
today, and in early June, Toshiba announced a line of SSDs based
on a 19nm process size. The advantages of smaller flash are
huge, since material costs money—and more flash can go on a
single chip, which most ob