Toshiba Ships 43nm SSDs to PC OEMs

Toshiba has announced today that its latest generation of Solid State Drives (SSDs), featuring the company's new 43nm MLC NAND-flash manufacturing technology, are now shipping to manufacturers. These high-performance storage solutions will initially be available to OEMs only, in capacities of 64GB, 128GB, 256GB and large-capacity 512GB, according to the company. Featuring 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch form factors, these new drives have been designed to provide a storage alternative for use in notebook computers, as well as gaming and home entertainment systems.

“The customer qualifications we've received attest to the enhanced performance of our second generation drives in improving the overall computing experience through reduction in wait times and faster boot and application loading,” said Scott Nelson, vice president, memory, Toshiba America Electronic Components. “Our SSD read and write speeds are among the fastest in the industry, based on our benchmarking, including H2benchw scores.”

As far as technical specifications go, these drives have been specifically designed to provide users with a high-performance and high-capacity storage alternative to current HDDs and some of the other low-performance and mainstream SSDs available on the market. Using a high-end, multi-channel MLC controller, the new Toshiba SSDs are designed to deliver sequential read speeds of 230MB/s, while the maximum write speed is expected to be set at around 180MB/s. As mentioned before, the drives are available in capacities of 64GB, 128GB, 256GB and 512GB in both 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch form factors. The maximum capacity for the 1.8-inch models is currently 256GB.

“Solid state drives offer not only significant performance and power advantages over hard disk drives, but compelling lower total cost of ownership over the lifetime of the notebook,” said Gregory Wong, president, Forward Insights. “Savings in total cost of ownership are particularly relevant to OEMs and business users in the current economic environment.”