With capacities growing at the rate of 175% annually, and compared with 60-year-old hard disk drive technology, NAND flash memory is still young and on the move.

In 1987, Toshiba announced the first NAND. By 1995, the company had introduced a 40MB memory card for cameras. Less than 20 years later, microSD NAND memory cards smaller than a fingernail can store more than 100 billion bytes of data.

How much can you store on a 128GB NAND flash card? About 32,000 songs, 27 DVD movies and up to 250,000 photos. While standard planar NAND flash is running up against a capacity wall, 3D NAND promises to continue to grow capacity well into the future.