Good enough for consumers, not quite for enterprises

Aug 11, 2015 13:05 GMT  ·  By

Toshiba announces three new families of PCIe SSDs that will use the NVMe protocol, while occupying four PCIe 3.0 lanes and boasting read/write performance of 3100MBps/2350MBps.

The new SSDs are built to excel using the best motherboard connections available, the PCI Express 3.0. Each NVMe SSD product is built with a unique Toshiba controller platform with the company's own MLC NAND flash memory, and they are designed for the best performance and reliability.

Toshiba offers drives in three storage sizes: 800GB, 1600GB and 3200GB. Every SSD model is built for its target market segment with suitable capacity, optimized form factor, and security capabilities.

As such, the company launches the XG3 family of SSDs for high-performance notebooks and PCs with the highest memory capacity available in the industry, using a client NVMe SSD that connects to an M.2 Type 2280 connector. This new SSD model is built for powerful laptops and performance notebooks. The XG3 connecting to the M.2 supports four lanes of the PCIe 3.1 type and has six time more interface bandwidth than current SATA 6Gb/s.

The XG3 also comes with Toshiba's own Quadruple Swing-By Code error-correction technology, which is basically an enterprise-oriented code that helps protect customer data from corruption and improves the drive's reliability.

Toshiba puts the excellent M.2 connector at the forefront

Adding to that is the new BG1 SSD family, advertised by Toshiba as the world's smallest NVMe SSD, which comes in a 16mm x 20mm package, also connected in an M.2 Type 1620 connector or removable M.2 Type 2230 module that has up to 256GB in capacity. The BG1 family is designed for thin notebooks and tablets, while offering a much better-performing alternative over SATA SSDs for such mobile PCs.

The last and the most powerful storage solution from Toshiba is the PX04P series of enterprise SSDs that are designed, evidently, for servers and cloud computing database centers. The PX04P series of 2.5-inch NVMe SSDs prides itself with the lowest power consumption in the entire industry. Consuming barely 18 watts on maximum performance, the PX04P’s combination of performance and power consumption makes it a good proposition for enterprise data storages.

These new additions, although tempting since they do come in 3.2TB storage sizes, will probably come with some hefty prices to boot, while not carrying much storage size anyway.

Toshiba is working hard right now to break the 16TB NAND flash limit, by using memory stacking technology, but it seems that we're a long way from that at the moment.

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