By Debra Vogler, Senior Technical Editor, Solid State Technology

The growing role that solid-state drives (SSDs), which use NAND flash memory to store digital data, are playing in the storage market was the subject of much discussion at last week’s IDEMA DISKCON 2007 conference in Santa Clara, CA.

Jim Elliott, director of flash marketing at Samsung, was upbeat about the growing market for new applications using NAND flash memory, explaining that the NAND market is diversifying beyond consumer applications, such as USB drives, MP3 players, and the cell phone, to SSDs. He noted that the cost of NAND flash is decreasing ~50%/GB/year, while density is increasing at a rate of 2X/yr. The typical density range for an MP3 player as well as cell phones is ~512MB