Solid-State Drives might just get even cheaper and bigger.

source: Computer World

Hot on the heel of my post yesterday about the rising prices of traditional mechanical hard drives (HDD), and the declining price of Solid-state drives (SSD), today, Intel, Micron doubles the density of NAND flash memory, which is what the vast majority of the current SSD use as their storage technology.

The new shrunken die at 20nm is said to double the capacity of flash storage over the current 25nm lithography process which is used by today’s solid-state drives. The joint venture IMFT (Intel-Micron Flash Technology) Spokesperson also mentioned a “significant” reduction of manufacturing costs associated with wafer production in the original Computer World article.

The new 20nm process is most likely going to be used for the next batch of SSDs from many big SSD players such as Corsair, OCZ, Intel, etc. What this means is that the next generation of SSDs (most likely early 2012), will have bigger capacity and the SSDs of the same capacity as now will have a lower cost.

This can be a tremendous push for many buyers who are either concerned with the current SSD capacity or the current prices. If my predictions are correct, the traditional hard drive company will need to make a swifter recovery if they want to recapture their lost market shares before SSDs come close to mechanical hard drives in cost/byte.

– PitaByte is a guest blogger on the Myriad Supply blogs. He blogs just about everything, mostly technology related.