The consumer storage market in 2006 saw the introduction of some innovative and much needed advances in technology, with companies like Samsung trying to bring SSD (Solid State Disks) to the mainstream. The HDD is normally considered to be the slowest part of a PC, with both its technology and speeds not being able to keep up with the advances in Memory and CPU processing.
SSD promises to reduce this performance lag, as SSDs unlike conventional moving part HDDs, are faster and consume about 1/10 the power of conventional HDDs. In keeping with this, Samsung moved closer to its goal today with the introduction of the world's first 16 GB NAND flash memory device built on a 50 nanometer process. This new device uses a 4KB page size for file access as compared to the standard 2KB that is used by competitors. As a result, the read speeds over the 2 KB devices have been increased by as much as 150%.
The introduction of this new refresh is just a bump in Samsung's goal of producing 128 GB SSDs by the first half of 2008. Samsung will begin mass production its new MLC 16GB NAND flash memory chips in Q1 2007.
Now that's called a next generation HDD. 
