SSDs haven’t found their way into the mass market yet, but a team of Japanese researchers is already trying to make them more worthwhile. The team claims it has developed a technology that helps to shrink the size of SSDs by no less than 90%, makes them cheaper and boosts energy efficiency by 70%.

The research group is comprised of people from a handful of different institutions, i. e. Toshiba or Keio University in Tokyo (where Professor Tadahiro Kuroda is the main person responsible).

The new technology makes it possible to produce 1TB SSDs that are as small as a postage stamp. The current prototype (pictured) is sized just like that and made of 128 NAND flash memory chips and one controller chip. It boasts a data transfer speed of 2Gbps and is based on radio communication, which (according to the researchers) leads to lower production costs.

A practical version is expected to be ready by 2012.

Via The Nikkei [registration required, paid subscription]