Two years ago I was writing about how hard drives were getting smaller, storing more data, costing less and failing more often. Now I hardly write anything about them at all.

Not surprising really when you consider that the world of small things is much more interesting, especially small things such as Solid State Drives for example.

Which is why I was interested to learn that one of the enterprise and mobile SSD processor pioneers, SandForce Inc, was emerging from stealth mode with a new product announcement.

That product being the SF-1000 SSD processor family.

Think highly integrated silicon devices that can help address the kind of endurance, reliability and data retention issues that everyone associates with NAND flash memory.

SandForce is talking up the possibility of building SSDs that will deliver "unprecedented performance over the life of the drive" complete with "orders-of-magnitude higher reliability" than existing enterprise-class HDDs.

IDC predicts worldwide shipments of SSDs in the Enterprise and PC markets will exceed 40 million units in 2012, representing a CAGR of 171 percent from 2007-2012.

Jeff Janukowicz, Research Manager, Hard Disk Drive Components and Solid State Disk Drives at IDC says "products like the SF-1000 Family can be major catalysts for increasing SSD adoption in the enterprise" and adds that these products should "have a highly positive impact on efficiency and total-cost-of-ownership when used in IT applications such as virtualization, transactional databases, and automated financial trading."

OEMs are expected to release SLC (single level cell) and MLC (multi-level cell) flash-based SSDs using SandForce single-chip SSD Processors later this year.