Toshiba has just announced that they will start manufacturing solid-state drives for their notebook PCs based on flash memory cells. The company unveiled their 32GB, 64GB and 128GB versions to be produced in three different form factors (embedded module, 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch sizes).

Solid-state drives are the alternative to nowadays' hard drives. They are the ideal storage solution especially in the mobile world, due to their reduced energy consumption, light weight and reliability, as well as the capability to take up physical shocks more efficiently. Quiet operation and faster boot time than hard disk drives makes them the ideal candidate for notebook use.

Toshiba's solid-state drives are based on multilevel cell NAND flash memory and will provide a standard SATA-II interface connector that will allow on-the-fly replacement for the current hard-disks in laptop configurations. The disks are powered by a 3.3 volt supply and can deliver a maximum write speed of 40MBps, while the read speeds are around 100MBps. Data transfer rate is estimated at about 3GBps. Toshiba spokespersons have announced that the disks will be displayed in several Toshiba notebooks during next month's International Consumer Electronics Show.

Universal adoption of the single-level NAND flash solid-state drives has been delayed by the fact that the devices are still handicapped by lower density and extremely high prices as compared to the hard-disk drives. Multi-level flash is cheaper, but involves an advanced technology in order to make it reliable for solid-state drive use. The new drive from Toshiba integrates an original MLC controller supporting fast read-write speeds, parallel data transfers and wear leveling, which makes the drive operate closely to single-level NAND performance.

The new products are built using 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. Toshiba will start sampling the disks during the first quarter of 2008. Mass production is estimated in May next year.