http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/article/HONSHI/20090528/170920/
SSDs Much Smaller
[..]
Technology development is already under way.
Toshiba, for example, is developing a single package with an 18 x 14mm mounting footprint that will
be a complete 128GB SSD (Fig 7). The small mounting area is only 1/15th the area required by a 1.8-inch HDD. If 16 of these packages were used to
make a 1.8-inch SSD, the resulting capacity would be 2TB.
This ultra-miniature SSD will stack 32 NAND Flash memory chips, each with 32GB capacity, in the package (see "Cutting-Edge SSD Packaging
Technology through Photos" on page 24). Toshiba says it has solved most of the technical issues involved in this type of high-density packaging, and
hopes to commercialize the SSD as early as a year or two from now.
[..]
According to Akihito Nishikawa, senior manager, Memory Division, SSD Application Engineering Dept of Toshiba, "The memory cell is assured for
about
3,000 rewrites. If the target SSD capacity is 128GB, then the total bit capacity is 128GB times 3,000 cycles divided by 1.5 (our figure for
rewrite efficiency), or 256TB. Toshiba research indicates that actual PC users generally don't rewrite more than 20GB, max, per day. If these numbers
are used to estimate the SSD service life, it works out to 256TB divided by 20GB divided by 365 days, or about 35 years. Considering average user
access conditions, quality is more than sufficient to assure that."
[..]
Still, other people have severe misgivings. An engineer at one major controller IC manufacturer warns: "A number of notebook PC manufacturers
are making snap decisions to use state-of-the-art 2-bit/cell memory. It's quite possible that problems will show up in the marketplace."
