"I think in the next four years or five years, it's probably going to be the case that NAND will no longer be the storage medium," said a flash memory analyst with Forward Insights. "Everybody's looking at alternatives."

Since the new device apparently will rely heavily on NAND flash for its computing and storage needs, and because the most recent products Apple has produced have tended to sell very well, the NAND flash industry may be looking at a major stabilizing factor.

Both Seagate and rival Western Digital have seen demand for disk drives return even as supplies of the devices remain low, pushing up profits.

OCZ said it will demonstrate an external hard drive at the CES show in Las Vegas. The drive uses Symwave's USB 3.0 storage controller and will deliver 10 times the transfer rate of USB 2.0 - which transfers data at 5Gb/s.

Samsung unveiled a multi-chip memory package that it claims is the thinnest ever, for smartphones, portable media players, laptops and other mobile electronics.

The major supplier of NAND flash silicon invested "millions" in Fusion-io, said Fusion-io President and CEO David Flynn, though he declined to give a more specific figure. The two will jointly evaluate technology for new applications of solid-state storage.

SanDisk is incorporating the X4 chips into existing storage cards, without any identifying labeling or change in pricing. The fact that it is not immediately passing cost savings on to consumers is a sign of easing conditions in the volatile market.

The Numonyx eMMC architecture is comprised of an embedded storage solution with multi-media card interface, flash memory device and host controller – all in a small BGA package. With interface speeds of up to 52MB per second, Numonyx eMMC also allows for an interface voltage of either 1.8V or 3.3V.

Cloud computing and flash-based storage, two fast-emerging IT technologies, are driving each other forward as users of Internet-based services like social networks demand near-real-time access to ever-growing amounts of data.

Converge has tracked increased demand from module manufacturers for 128x8 DDR2 chips, both in PC667 and PC800 speeds. However, there are mixed opinions on why the market has become so tight for these modules.

Toshiba has begun volume shipments of solid-state drives ranging up to 512GB in size. The drives are built on a 43nm manufacturing process using multi-level cell (MLC) technology.

Seagate Technology said it will close its Singapore hard-disk-drive manufacturing plant by the end of 2010 and lay off 2,000 workers as a result.

Converge also reports that demand for DDR3 modules remains strong, with supplies limited, and that Xeons and AMD Opterons are the drivers for cost savings in the CPU space.

Researchers have developed a breakthrough storage technology capable of squeezing the contents of 250 DVDs onto a disk the size of a quarter.

The SD Association unveiled a new SD card specification this week at the 2009 International CES that it said can support data storage capacities of up to 2TB with read/write speeds up to 104MB/sec. The specification, called SDXC (eXtended Capacity), uses Microsoft's exFAT file system to support the large capacity and interoperability in a broad range of PCs, consumer electronics and mobile phones.