Toshiba to Launch NAND Solid State Drives

Toshiba America Electronics Components says it is taking a leap into the emerging market for NAND-flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs).

The company, along with its parent company Toshiba Corp., plans to show a series of products featuring multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory offered in a range of form factors and capacities at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.

Toshiba's SSDs are primarily designed for notebook PCs. The company plans to launch mass production of the products during the first quarter of 2008.

The line will include 32-GB, 64-GB and 128-GB capacities and form factors that include an embedded module and enclosures sized 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch. The market for solid-state NAND drives is driven by the category's faster access times versus traditional rotational platter magnetic media based hard drives.

Some say that because NAND drives are faster and have no moving parts they are ideal for running operating systems like Vista Media Center and will make Media Centers that utilize them boot faster and be more reliable, durable and stable.

From a Toshiba press release:

SSDs realize lower power consumption, a faster boot time, higher reliability, improved performance and no mechanical sound compared to hard disk drives, but market penetration has been held back by low densities and high prices. Toshiba's new SSDs integrate an original MLC controller supporting fast read-write speed, parallel data transfer, and wear-leveling, and achieve performance levels comparable to those of single-level cell NAND-flash-based SSDs.

With its NAND SSD product launch, Toshiba joins a growing list of manufacturers in the market, which include Samsung and Mtron.

Toshiba credits its use of MLC technology for being able to cram 128-GB capacity into a 1.8-inch form factor, and adds that it "expects the launch of its MLC NAND-based line-up to speed up the acceptance of solid-state memory in laptops and digital consumer products and to widen the horizons of the NAND flash market."

Toshiba says it will begin mass production of the embedded module by March 2008 and mass production of the 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch models in May of 2008.