Introducing the Miniature Storage Drive Market

the Fastest SSDs
the SSD Buyers Guide
Predicting Future Flash SSD Performance

• M-Systems - developed the market concept of the DiskOnChip.
  
  In 2001 M-Systems' DiskOnChip flash SSD offered 16MB capacity in a single 48-pin TSOP (Thin Small Outline Package). By 2006, when the company was acquired by SanDisk, the DiskOnChip capacity had grown to gigabytes. The primary application at the time was mobile phone handsets.

• Toshiba - showed a prototype 0.85" hard drive in January 2004.
  
  With 4GB capacity it was the world's physically smallest hard drive at the time. When launching the new form factor Toshiba said "the 0.85" HDD is expected to boost the functionality of a new generation of products, including mobile phones, digital audio players, PDAs, digital still cameras, camcorders and external storage devices."

• Unlike the other 2 companies above which drifted in from the military or notebook markets - Cornice was a startup whose sole reason for existence for the small form factor consumer storage market.
  
  Cornice aspired to become the leading supplier of hard disks to the phone market, and various other markets like mobile music players and video cameras.
  
  Cornice's 2GB Storage Element appeared in some products shown at CES in 2004.
  
  In 2004 I said "Cornice's Storage Element does for disk drives what the original RISC concept did for CISC CPUs. It's like a Reduced Instruction Set hard drive which cuts out the unneeded Complexity."
  
  The product turned out to be risky in the conventional sense for the investors who had put $81 million into the company. A combination of patent lawsuits and market developments in flash SSDs put paid to their ambitions within a few years of launching their first product.