Toshiba Entering the Flash Disk Market

Toshiba Corporation announced its entry into the
emerging market for NAND-flash-based solid state drive (SSD) with a
series of products featuring multilevel-cell NAND flash memories.
Offered in a range of form factors and densities, Toshiba’s solid state
drives are designed primarily for notebook PCs. They will be showcased
at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, from January 7^th to 10^th. Samples and mass production will follow from the first quarter (January to March) of next year.

Moving
NAND-based storage architecture forward, Toshiba’s first solid state
drives offer three densities: 32 gigabytes (GB), 64GB and 128GB. SSD
realize low power consumption, a fast boot time, and lightweight, but
market penetration has been held back by low densities and high prices.
Toshiba’s new SSD integrate an original MLC controller supporting fast
read-write speeds, parallel data transfers and wear leveling, and
achieve performance levels comparable to those of single-level NAND
flash SSD. By applying MLC technology, Toshiba has realized a 128GB
density in a 1.8 inch form factor. Toshiba expects the launch of its
SSD line-up to speed up acceptance of solid state memory in laptops and
digital consumer products, and to widen the horizons of the NAND flash
market.

The new products utilize NAND flash memory
fabricated with 56nm process technology, along with controller chips
and DRAM, on a 70.6mm (L) x 53.6mm (W) x 3.0mm (H) platform. The
maximum read speed is 100MB a second, and the maximum write speed of
40MB a second with the SATA2 interface (transfer rate of 3Gbps), which
is compliant with high speed serial interface. The operating life is
1,000,000 hours.

Toshiba Corp.