Hitachi designs faster memory based hard drive

JAPANESE FIRM Hitachi ULSI has combined NAND flash and DRAM memory to produce a fast replacement for optomechanical hard drives.

According to nikkei.net, its existing NAND storage devices only have an access speed of 33MB/s, but a breakthrough will speed that up by a factor of three.

The report said that devices will be available this time next year in sizes up to 32GB but the devices will be expensive - as much as ¥100,000 (~$860). But Hitachi will be targeting the embedded market and specific applications, not you, me and the world+dog.

The drives work by storing data to DRAM and then to NAND flash using a proprietary design which uses far less blocks of data. µ

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