NAND is all over the news this week. Toshiba/SanDisk just announced its 48-layer BiCS 3D NAND, just hours before Intel and Micron announced its partnership to create its very own NAND flash chips for SSDs. It would stack up 32 layers of floating gate flash cells, as well as enable NAND dies of up to 32GB of data in MLC mode, or 48GB of data in TLC mode (AnandTech). This is an improvement from the norm of 16GB capacity found in most NAND dies today.

Ars Technica gave the quick rundown of the difference between MLC and TLC, for those of us who don't want to read an entire article on SSD technology to understand it. TLC NAND is known to store more data in the same amount of space than MLC can, however it comes with the limitation of less durability. The result is that these flash chips would be thicker rather than larger, as stacking the NAND on a 4-plane design makes for more capacity (3D NAND can handle a larger cell structure when vertically stacked). Take a few of those and put them together, and you get up to 10TB of space for a standard 2.5-inch SATA drive, and 3.5TB on M.2 form factor drives.

Intel/Micron are sampling their 3D NAND technology now, and by mid 2015, the companies will start selling products that use the 3D chips. Increasing the storage density of SSDs is good news for those who need a lot of space, and can also drastically increase storage capacities we will see in devices. Plus, by surpassing hard drives, SSDs have more light shining on them in general. Full disclosure on chip life expectancy is unknown.