Flash Drives Getting Smaller

The NAND (not and) flash technology that Toshiba introduced in 1989 (130nm or nanometers), making thumb drives, SSDs, (solid state drive) and smartphone memory, has finally reached a development dead end. Toshiba and other major manufacturers of 15 nm NAND flash are stopping new development and focusing development on 3D NAND.

For comparison, a strand of human DNA is 2.5 nm in diameter, and there are 25,400,000 nanometers in one inch. 1 centimeter = 10,000,000 nanometers.

Intel says it will be able to fit 1TB (terabytes) on a card just two millimeters thick in an object half the size of a postage stamp.

A square inch drive with a Terabyte of capacity can contain more bits than the Milky Way has stars (about 200 billion to 400 billion stars as estimated by astronomers). Obviously, when it comes to computers, size matters and smaller is better. Incidentally, My blog spoke of terabytes in 2010 LINK

Nano Sim

Those little cards in cameras and phones are about to get much smaller. At .47 x .35 of an inch, it is 60% smaller than the regular SIM cards in a majority of the devices out on the market. It is also 15% thinner than previous SIM cards. They will be out early next year. A few reasons why this is important - they are cheaper, also they are smaller so there is more room in devices (or the devices can be smaller), and they are faster. The best reason is they have nano in their name and I love anything nano.