A fierce flash chip battle

Toshiba vies with Samsung Electronics for control of market for advanced memory chips used in portable music devices.
The New York Times

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Hard drives?

Seems to me that the technology exists today to do away with hard drives. Surely it wouldn't take much to stack a bunch of 2 gig NANDS to form a 100 gig hard drive? Not a perfect solution, but until the size limitation is solved it might make a very attractive, small, and cool (in both senses) laptop!

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A few years ago 2gb was the size of a hard drive

Hard drive capacities continue to climb but the size of the hard drive in your average laptop has slowed and it's indeed possible that it will soon be replaced. Once that happens the forces behind hard drives will erode and HD capacity increases will start lagging allowing the capacity of these memory chips to catch up. Of course that's only a possible scenario and one that people would've guessed as happening by now if you'd asked how long it would be before it happened just five years ago so an actual timeframe could still be years off.

[Young Joon]

Samsung didn't buy NAND technology from Toshiba

When Toshiba introduced NAND Flash, Samsung licenced the relevant NAND patent from Toshiba to provide the 2nd soucing to the market. Patent is public information document that anyone can use under license. Just like all DRAM vendors licensed DRAM patent from TI, Samsung merely licensed the NAND patent from Toshiba, not bought the technology itself. Since Samsung started NAND program, it has buit up a broad NAND patent portfolio of more than 100 US patents.