A breakthrough in NAND Flash Memory performance

As the consumer and computing worlds slowly converts to the use of solid state storage devices, a breakthrough in the development NAND Flash memory has resulted in the creation of the world’s fastest NAND. This will definitely bring us much more closer to replacing the hard disk drive on our desktop and laptop computers.

Although most of our computers right now uses a hard disk drive for storing our files like photos and videos, already majority of our consumer devices like cameras and mobile phones are using solid state storage like microSD and compact flash.

Today Intel Corporation and Micron Technology Inc. has announced the development of NAND flash, the basic building block for solid state devices like microSD and compact flash, that is five times faster than the current NAND in the market. The new technology will allow us to access our photos, videos and other files at a fraction of a second than what we currently have.

By comparison the current NAND technology is limited to reading at 40 MB/s and writing at less than 20 MB/s. The new technology developed by Intel and Micron is able to achieve speeds of up to 200 MB/s for reading and 100 MB/s for writing data.

The read / write speed of high-speed NAND flash is faster than hard disks but the current cost of high-speed NAND flash is one of the major factor that contributes to the wide acceptance of solid state storage devices. As the technology develops further and as the user base increases, we will be able to see more and more computing devices that will use the solid state devices for primary storage.

Once the technology has been applied to products, we will definitely see the advantages in the increased speed in the current devices. One major beneficiary will be the storage devices used in our digital video cameras, still cameras and mobile phones. The five times increase in speed will greatly improve the ability to record and play high definition video in these devices.