On Wednesday, Toshiba Corporation officially announced that they will release a 512GB solid state disk in Q2 2009 but the company will display their new product in January at the consumer Electronics Show. For the moment, Toshiba hasn’t mentioned any information about the price tag.

At the time when the SSD will be released, it will be one of the largest drives of its type, being comparable in terms of size even with regular hard disk drives on the market today. Not only it will have a big capacity, but it will also be incredibly fast. Toshiba reported that its solid drive will be capable of a strikingly 240MBps write and 200MBps write speeds.

The SSD also promises to withstand the test of time, having a one million hours mean time before failure (MTBF). The solid drives are based on MLC NAND and an “advanced controller architecture.”  This may sound very high-tech, but NAND is the name for the flash technology that is used in your usual flash drive or memory card.

Toshiba also announced that they are readying a bunch of 43 nanometer technology SSD, with 64GB, 128GB and 256GB respectively, which will be capable of similar speeds and life span as the 512 drive. All these drives have multi-level cell (MLC) technology which means higher density of data capacity and lower manufacturing costs.


Yet, competition isn’t staying still, as Samsung has already released a 256GB solid state drive and Micron Technology is getting ready to release a 256GB in March 2009.

A solid state drive (SSD) is a non-volatile type of data storage device. An SSD is, in fact, based on different types of memories, such as flash memory or SRAM/DRAM. Among the advantages of using a solid drive, the most important are the instant access time, due to the drive’s architecture and the fact that it is shock proof because there are no moving parts.


Flash-based SSDs are currently the most widely used. They come in two versions: single-level cell (SLC) and multi-level cell (MLC). SLC drives offer better overall performance and are somewhat more reliable than MLC drives because each byte of data is stored in its own cell. This type of architecture also means that SLC drives are more expensive to manufacture and offer lower capacity per cell.

SSDs are also non-audible and usually they drag less power than a conventional hard drive. Because of its qualities, more and more SSDs have been released recently, often being offered as an upgrade in high-end laptops. Still, SSDs have become rather popular in the so-called netbooks, which are low-cost, ultraportable computers. Even though performance of the solid drives in these machines is sometimes worse than a typical hard drive, more and more people prefer it over HDDs because of the shock-proof design.