Samsung May Have Just Put An End To Expandable Storage Slots
A good number of flagship devices on the market right now do not have expandable storage slots. The HTC One, Nexus 4, Optimus G, soon to be announced G2 all rely on internal storage only (and possibly cloud storage). Most of these phones come with decent internal storage, 32GB (with the exception of the Nexus 4), but some still want more space. Well how does 128GB of internal storage sound? Do you think you’d need a expandable storage slot if you had that in your phone?
While it may seem like we’re a ways off from that kind of storage in a phone or tablet, the truth is, we could have that by next year. Samsung has just announced that they have begun mass production on the industries first “three-dimensional (3D) Vertical NAND (V-NAND) flash memory.” These new 3D V-NAND chips will offer a whopping 128GB of storage on a single chip with the possibility of going all the way up to an entire terabyte! If I had that kind of storage on my phone, I definitely wouldn’t care about a micro-SD card slot.
As previously mentioned, these chips are expected to make their way into mobile devices in 2024 but it’s possible that some solid state drives could start utilizing them later this year. Samsung states in their press release that it took them 10 years of research to pull this thing together and its protected by more than 300 patents!
Sounds pretty incredible doesn’t it? On a side note, it’s quite possible that the upcoming Ubuntu Edge, which promises at least 128GB of internal storage, will utilize this chip (assuming they hit their goal! fingers are crossed). If you want to know more about the new chip, hit the link below for the full press release and explanation of the chip.
Correction: These new chips will support 128Gb – 1Tb which translates to 16GB-128GB.
[Samsung]