Coming in 2009: A 128GB Flash Memory Card

That's good for storing, oh, about 32,000 songs on an iPod Nano-sized MP3 player, or about 77 days of straight music. If only the battery would last that long.

Tech columnist Dean Takahashi reports that Samsung has developed new, smaller flash-memory chips that could result in tiny iPods and MP3 players with mammoth storage capacities. (Yes, you can already get 120GB MP3 players, but they all require bulky, delicate hard drives.) The 64-gigabit NAND memory chips, designed using a 30-nanometer production process (compared to today's typical 50-namometer process), can be combined into a single 128GB flash-memory card. To put that in some perspective, you could cram about 80 standard-def movies onto one of these new cards (assuming each movie averages 1.6GB, which sounds right for a ripped DVD) or about 30,000 songs (averaging 4MB each). Samsung says it hopes to start shipping the new chips by 2009.

Sounds amazing, right? But how much will the new chips cost? Open question, but at least one analyst thinks Samsung could have a "difficult time" cranking out a substantial number of the chips by the projected 2009 ship date—and that means higher prices.

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Do you need 32,000 songs on your iPod? [Tech Talk with Dean Takahashi]