News and New Products

Toshiba enters NAND-flash-based SSD market

By Suzanne Deffree, Managing Editor, News -- Electronic News, 12/10/2007

Toshiba Corp. and Toshiba America Electronic Components Inc. (TAEC), its subsidiary in the Americas, late Sunday announced their entry into the emerging market for NAND-flash-based solid-state drives (SSD) with a series of products featuring multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory.

The move marks the second memory maker to enter the SSD market in as many weeks. On November 28, Micron Technology Inc. moved into the SSD market with 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch form factors for notebook and desktop computing applications in 32-GByte and 64-GByte densities, and an embedded USB form factor, ranging in density from 1-GByte to 8-GByte of storage.

Toshiba’s first SSDs target computers and offer three capacities, 32-GByte, 64-GByte and 128-GByte, in three form factors, an embedded module, and 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch drive enclosures. Toshiba said its use of MLC NAND is what allowed it to reach densities as high as 128-GByte in a 1.8-inch form factor.

The products use NAND flash memory fabricated with 56-nm process technology, along with controller chips and DRAM, on a 70.6-mm x 53.6-mm x 3-mm platform. The maximum read speed is 100-MByte per second, and the maximum write speed is 40-MByte per second with the SATA II interface, which is compliant with a high-speed serial interface. The rated operating life is 1,000,000 hours, Toshiba claimed.

Toshiba will showcase the SSDs at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, from January 7 to 10, 2008. Samples and mass production are planned to follow in Q1. the company did not release pricing information.