In some pretty exciting news, Adtron has announced capacity increases in their flash drives, with 2.5-inch NAND flash drives available with a whopping capacity of 160 gigabytes!

New geometries and chip densities in SLC NAND enable Adtron to significantly expand the capacities of its industry leading high performance products,” stated Alan Fitzgerald, Adtron Chief Technology Officer. “In addition, the economics of these new flash drives combined with the increased capacities in standard form factors, greatly expand the applications among our historic flash disk customers in the industrial and defense markets, as well as addressing bandwidth intensive server and storage acceleration applications in a much broader emerging market previously the domain of HDD products”

Clearly, there are still many questions we need to ask here to figure out the applicability of products like these in consumer hardware. How these drives compare to conventional hard drives in performance and price is going to be key in gauging when Apple will make flash drives at least a part of their portables’ storage options. Potentially, though, Apple can do more than use small NAND flash drives for storing certain data, and can actually make a wholesale switch to flash drives, at least as an option. With capacities already at 160 GB in a 2.5-inch form factor, capacity is no longer a limiting factor for use of flash drives as the main means of storage in a computer.

Filed under: New Products