Building a bigger SSD.
Solid State Drives, or SSDs, are currently the fastest widely-available storage medium available to buy for the average PC enthusiast, offering a lot of speed but not too much space - especially compared to HDDs.
Intel have teamed up with Micron, the maker of flash memory, to develop a new technology that will allow both companies to pack in more data in the same physical space which should come at a negligible price increase.
Current SSDs are Single-Layer-Cell (SLC) or Multi-Layer-Cell. (MLC), which would be best described as the honeycomb in a beehive.
An SLC SSD would be able to store one drop (or one bit) of honey (data) per cell of in the honeycomb, while MLC can store two drops. There's no additional cells added, so the hive takes up the same physical space, but there's more honey in there.
These 3-bit cells are the same thing again, letting three drops be stored in the same physical flash chips opposed to simply one or two - albeit at a very likely small performance drop that only testing will clear up.
As with anything that increases density (like the perpendicular recording for HDDs), the 3-bit tech makes accessing the data a little more complex, but it's certainly nothing that can't be worked on.
What this means for us is larger SSDs at the same prices, and with flash chips already falling in price more space is always welcome.
Head over to PCWorld for more on the Intel/Micron 3-bit cell partnership.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012