It was only September when BitMICRO made us want a pile of cash just so as to buy a 416GB 2.5-inch Altima solid state drive but now, the company has upped the stakes and has doubled storage space faster than OLPC can say - Get out of my house, Intel! The new 832 GB solid state drive is by far the biggest of its kind around and it utilizes multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash chips which double the number of bits stored per memory cell compared to the single-level cell (SLC) NAND.

Thanks to the EDSA and LUNETA controllers the new E-Disk Altima monster will be able to deliver sustained rates of up to 100 MB/s and up to 20,000 I/O operations per second while the SATA 3.0 Gbps interface will also make sure the drive has "hot pluggable" capabilities and all-round compatibility with today's hardware.

The good news end here as the 832GB Altima SSD will only be sampling in Q2 of this year while volume shipping is expected by Q3 2008. As for the price, you'll have to sell your house to get maybe two of them.