Coming to confirm its spring plans, Toshiba has announced that it will have a lot of SSDs ready in 2009, including a 2.5-inch 512GB solid state drive. Set to be showcased at CES 2009 next month, the 512GB drive is part of Toshiba's second-generation SSD line-up which also includes 64, 128 and 256GB 2.5- and 1.8-inch SSDs and 1.8-inch flash modules.

Equipped with 43nm MLC (multi-level cell) NAND flash memory chips, the upcoming SSDs have SATA 3.0 Gbps interfaces, a MTTF (mean time to failure) and brag with read and write speeds of 240 MB/s and 200 MB/s respectively.

"The solid state drive market is evolving rapidly, with higher performance drives to meet market requirements, and differentiated product families targeted for appropriate applications,” said Mr. Kiyoshi Kobayashi, Vice President of Toshiba Corporation's Semiconductor Company. "This new 43nm SSD family balances value/performance characteristics for its targeted consumer applications, through use of MLC NAND and an advanced controller architecture."

Set to start sampling in Q1 2009, all of Toshiba's next-gen drives will enter mass production in Q2.




Picture courtesy of akihabaranews.com.