For too long, it looked like SSD capacity would always lag well behind hard disk drives, which were pushing into the 6TB and 8TB territory while SSDs were primarily 256GB to 512GB.

That seems to be ending. Not long after Samsung announced a 3.2TB SSD drive, Intel announced its alliance with Micron Technology will yield enormous capacity SSD drives.

During an investor webcast last week, Intel announced it will begin offering 3D NAND drives in the second half of next year as part of its joint flash venture with Micron. It stacks 32 planar layers of NAND memory with 3 bits per cell for 32GB of storage in a single MLC die. Pack a bunch of those chips onto an SSD drive or PCI Express card and capacities will easily break the multiple terabyte barrier.

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