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Samsung announced today that its sampling 16 gigabit NAND flash memory, prepping the way for solid state disk drives and other high-capacity storage.

Solid-state hard drives have been a long-wished for dream in many technology circles: the basic idea is to stop storing data on the fast-spinning, metal-spattered platters that comprise today's hard drives and start storing data in non-volatile, cool-running, quiet, no-moving-parts memory. After all, the failure rate for hard drives is 100 percent (wait long enough, they'll all fail) so we're all playing pretty fast and loose with our data.

Once the problem of non-volatile, solid state memory had been solved, the issues with solid state drives have been capacity and cost: it just hasn't been cost effective to compete against the spinning platters. But today, Samsung announced a new development which brings the idea of solid state drives one step closer to an everyday reality, announcing it is sampling 16 gigabit NAND flash memory modules to customers, with mass production scheduled to get underway in the first quarter of 2007. The new memory also features a 4K read and write page size to enhance data access functions, effectively doubling the read speed of the memory and increasing the efficiency of write operations by 150 percent.

Expect to see 16 GB modules in everything from digital cameras to cell phones to (of course) those ubiquitous portable media players—and the 16 GB capacity also starts to get into the realm where several modules lashed together begin to form credible solid-state replacements for conventional hard drives.