This is an article on ways to use digital storage, especially solid state storage, to save power in data centers.

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Flash as a form of solid state storage is much faster for reading and writing data than the spinning disks in traditional disk drives.

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The flash cache is used to store frequently accessed data providing the fast data response found in solid state drives while the hard disk storage provides low cost storage.

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Control of power utilization in these data centers will drive new tiered storage approaches with solid state storage combined with HDDs and with new non-volatile memory using either flash memory or new approaches such as MRAM.

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"Toggle DDR provides a faster interface than conventional NAND using an asynchronous design, delivering the benefits of high-speed data transfer to a wider market, such as for solid state drive (SSD) applications including enterprise storage, mobile phones, multimedia terminals and consumer products, " said Masaki Momodomi, Technical Executive, Memory product, Toshiba Corporation.

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Getting to that stage might mean combining self-assembly methods with lithography, or doing away with the head that reads the data-packed disk and instead creating a self-assembling solid-state system on the model of Flash memory storage used today.

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