Japanese Scientists Cut SSD Physical Size By 90 Percent

Japanese researchers have succeeded in shrinking solid state devices by a whopping 90 percent and managed at the same time to make them cheaper and more energy efficient by 70 percent.

The team was formed by scientists coming from a number of entities like Toshiba and the Keio University in Tokyo and has already produced a postage stamp-sized storage device.

Their first prototype uses 128 NAND memory chips to achieve a capacity of 1TB (according to various reports), meaning that the NAND Flash memory used were 64Gb ones, possibly from Toshiba.

However, what will actually make SSD devices based on this solution fare even better than existing ones is the use of a controller chip and "radio communication" (not sure whether that means some sort of ultra short range, very high throughput technology).

The use of Radio communication is said to be vital to reduce the price of the device. The prototype has also successfully achieved a data transfer speed of 2Gbps which is a third of what the theoretical maximum of SATA 3.0.

Expect the first commercial devices to come out by 2012, that's only two years away from now, and to boost even better specifications.