Toshiba readies 128GByte notebook SSD

The drive, which has no moving parts, achieves the unusually high capacity at a lower cost than most SSDs through the use of multilevel cell NAND flash technology. Most SSDs today are single-level cell drives, which store 1bit 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.

Nevertheless, SSDs in general cost multiples more than traditional hard disk drives (HDDs). In justifying the higher cost, manufacturers claim SSDs are faster and are more reliable and rugged, since there are not moving parts. Recently, however, researcher Avian Securities has challenged those claims, reporting that dissatisfied customers have been returning SSD-based Dell notebooks in high numbers. The computer maker has said that Avian's estimated rate of returns is way too high.

Valuable solution
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 released Tuesday.

Toshiba, which has not released pricing, claims the new drive has a read speed of 100MBps and a write speed of 40MBps, making it faster than 5,400rpm and 7,200rpm HDDs. The company says it achieved the high performance level through the use of a Serial ATA II interface and a new MLC controller.

As a result, the latest drive performs extremely well in Windows Vista boot speed, application loading, general usage, and virus scan operations, according to Toshiba.

The new product weighs about three hundredths of a pound and is in an embedded module form factor.

Toshiba has also begun mass production of a 64Gbyte embedded module. The company plans to start sampling next month the same size SSDs in 1.8inch and 2.5inch drive enclosures.

Significant performance boost?
While manufacturers plow ahead with notebook-targeted SSDs, questions are arising as to whether they deliver a performance boost significant enough to justify the higher cost. Avi Cohen, managing partner of Avian Securities, found the rate of return on SSD notebooks from Dell ranged from 20 percent to 30 percent. A Dell spokesman, however, said those numbers were "wholly inaccurate by orders of magnitude." The computer maker declined to release specific numbers.

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 percent 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."

- Antone Gonsalves
InformationWeek

Keywords: 128Gbyte solid-state drive   NAND flash   hard disk drives