A terabyte of storage on your fingertip? If Tadahiro Kuroda and his team of researchers from Toshiba and Keio University in Tokyo have developed a technique that packs 128 NAND flash chips and a controller into the area of a postage stamp, effectively reducing the size of SSDs by 90 percent.

Are you ready for more good news? Apart from undergoing the shrink ray treatment, the new SSDs are said to consume 70 less electricity, will be cheaper to produce and a prototype can transfer data at 2.5 Gbps, higher than SATA 1 and SATA 2 drives.

The group hopes to see the technology go into production in 2012. If so, expect it to be an exciting year for data storage market, one that ushers in a new breed of energy efficient storage systems.

Image Credit: PhysOrg.com/Prof. Tadahiro Kuroda