Monday, March 24, 2008
Toshiba this week said it plans before April to ship a 128 GB solid-state drive that will appear first in Toshiba notebooks sold in Japan.
The drive, which has no moving parts, achieves the unusually high capacity at a lower cost than most SSDs through the use of multi-level cell NAND flash technology. Most SSDs today are single-level cell drives, which store 1 bit of data in each memory cell. MLC drives, on the other hand, store 3 or more bits in each cell. While MLC drives have slower transfer speeds and higher power consumption, they are also far less expensive to make.
Toshiba believes its latest SSD strikes the right balance between price and performance. "We believe that Toshiba MLC SSDs offer the right mix of cost and performance to satisfy today's demanding storage requirements for notebooks and ultra-mobile PCs," Scott Nelson, VP of memory for Toshiba division Toshiba America Electronic Components, said in a statement.
Makers of NAND flash, the memory technology used in SSDs, are hoping notebook adoption will give the industry a much-needed financial boost this year. Researcher iSuppli last month cut its 2008 revenue outlook for the global NAND flash market to the single-digit percentage range from its previous estimate of a 27% increase. Flash manufacturers last year took in $13.9 billion.
ISuppli issued the warning "amid troubling signs of order reductions and weakness in consumer spending."
By: DocMemory
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