TDK has developed the world’s largest capacity small form factor solid state drive. The drive is 20% smaller than a 2.5” laptop disk drive and includes all the driver chips necessary for ATA communications. A total of 16x16Gbit NAND flash chips cover the circuit board giving the drive a storage capacity of 32GB.  That’s fairly impressive for a solid state drive in that form factor.  The GBDriver RA5 NAND controller which provides the ATA interface to the flash, supports UDMA33 giving the drive a maximum transfer rate of 33.3MB/second. No details are given about the drives sustained data speeds however.

No released date for this device has been given.  I fully expect to see similar form factor drives in the near future from Samsung, possibly utilizing their new Charge Trap Flash technology to compliment their already released 2.5” plug in laptop hard drive line.  Begun the solid state drive war has!