Toshiba and Keio University in Tokyo have developed new technology that would make it possible to produce 1TB SSDs as small as postage stamp. The team claims the new technology will shrink the size of solid state drive by 90 percent and reduce the power requirement by 70 percent while making them cheaper to manufacture.

The current prototype developed by the team is about 1-inch2 in size and uses 128 NAND flash memory chips along with one controller chip to achieve 1TB capacity. The SSD offers data transfer speed of 2Gbps and is based on radio communication that allows lower production costs and power consumption.

The two major roadblocks stopping large scale SSD adoption in computers are capacity and price. For example, today a 2TB hard drive is available for less that $150, but the highest capacity SSD (1TB) can cost more than $2,500, which is 15 times more than hard drive. If the above mention technology would bring higher capacity SSDs at comparable prices, SSD adoption will accelerate. SSDs based on the new technology should come to the market by late 2012 or early 2013.
[Via TechCrunch]