Despite the major success of Flash based solid state storage, it has a few drawbacks such as fairly limited sustained transfer rates and an archival life of a couple of years.  Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania claim to have overcome these obstacles with the development of self-assembling nanowires.  These are made of a phase-changing material that can switch between an amorphous and crystalline state to represent the digital 0's & 1's.  These states can accessed or changed at 1,000 times faster than accessing data on flash based storages and claim to be stable for 100,000 years.

Going by the researcher's tests, data encoding consumes just 0.7mW per bit and the data can be retrieved in just 50 nanoseconds.  They also claim that its technology is more durable and simpler in construction compared with other storage technology such as Flash.  A few examples of its benefits include booting a laptop or PC in a few seconds and storing a vast amount of content such as several hundred movies in a small physical size.

If this technology turns out to be a success in which high capacity solid state drives can be developed at a reasonable cost, it would not only make hard drives obsolete, but also potentially kill the optical disc format, particularly if the drive cost gets low enough for low capacity versions.  On the other hand, time will tell whether this technology becomes a success.

Further information can be read in this c|net story.