The trick to making laptops as thin and light as they’ve gotten has in large part been the transition from traditional hard drives to flash-based solid state drives. The trade-off has been the amount of storage you get (less) and amount you pay for it (much, much more). Micron and Intel appear to have solved at least one of those problems.
The two companies today announced new 3D NAND technology—a variation on the tech that enables the type super-small storage spaces you find in the MacBook Air and other ultralight laptops—that stacks layers of flash cells vertically to increase density. The development comes just in time; the previous production method, known as planar NAND, has nearly maxed out its potential.
When you cut through the technical language, the net result is that 2.5-inch SSDs could come in 10TB capacities, compared to the 1TB drives most laptops max out at today. The smaller SSDs required for the super-skinny laptops of the world won’t see quite as much of a gain, but could still see a jump to 3.5TB, compared to the 512GB you see currently.
It’s a welcome breakthrough, likely also a pricey one for the average consumer. While Intel and Micron indicated that there should be “better cost efficiencies” to 3D NAND versus its planar predecessor, solid state drives remain terrifically expensive next to their spinning disk ancestors. Stepping up from a 128GB SSD MacBook Air to an otherwise identical 256GB MacBook Air adds $200 to your bill, and that’s a fraction of the kind of capacity gains 3D NAND allows.
And even if you were interested in dropping a grand or so on an ultrabook with 2.5TB onboard—maybe you’ve decided to rip 80 Blu-ray discs on a lark?—it’s going to be a little while before you can actually get your hands on one. The 3D NAND chips won’t go into production until closer to the end of this year, which means you won’t see them in consumer devices until 2016 at the earliest.
Still, cheaper and more efficient flash storage—especially this much more efficient—is an incredibly important breakthrough, especially as our lives increasingly revolve around mobile devices that simply don’t have much room to spare. Besides, the less space you waste on an SSD, the more you’ll have for what you really care about: a battery big enough to last you through the day.
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