CNET is reporting that large-capacity Solid State Drives (SSD)s should be available later this year, ranging in capacity from 120GB to 160GB.
This is very important news for the ultraportable market, as this approaches the capacity of mechanical/spindle-based hard drives, as well as it should cause the pricing of 48GB and 64GB drives (such as those found in the MacBook Air or the Sony VAIO TZ2 series) to drop quite a bit.
The news is based on announcements from Sandisk regarding a new 43-nanometer manufacturing process and other improvements that Sandisk and Toshiba will be using (“X3” technology).
The new process can be applied to other flash memory-based storage, such as MicroSD cards that could double in capacity, to 16GB.