Jun 27 2008
High Speed NAND Drives
The age of solid state storage memory is arriving. A 64 GB NAND drive in a MacBook AIR costs $900. Mass production of high capacity NAND drives is only now beginning, though, so their price is at a premium.
I paid $2000 for a 2GB Barracuda drive in 1994. Nowadays, cutting edge drives cost 50¢ per GB (Terabyte and up) and older generation drives cost 35¢ a GB.
Watch for rapid price drops and capacity bumps in NAND drives over the coming months (and more over the years).
But, one of the most exciting things in these drives is speed bumps. A partnership between Intel and Micron Technologies is claiming achieving read speeds of 200 MB/Sec and write speeds of 100 MB/Sec for upcoming NAND Drives. We’re looking at a real speed bump in the near future in transfer rates.