Toshiba Corp. on Wednesday became the industry’s first company to announce 512GB solid-state drive. In addition, the company said that its multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory chips will enable it to bring a plethora of new high-capacity products in small form-factors.

In addition to the 2.5”, 512GB drive, the family of SSDs powered by 43nm chips also includes capacities of 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB, offered in 1.8” or 2.5” drive enclosures or as SSD fash modules. Toshiba declared 240MB/s sequential read speed and 200MB/s sequential write speed for the new family of solid state drives, which is very high performance compared to competing devices even based on more advanced single-level cell NAND flash. The drives also offer AES data encryption to prevent unauthorized data access.

For some reason, Toshiba declares 1 million hours mean time to failure (MTTF) for its new flash-based storage devices. 1 million hours is not only lower than 1.5 million hours mean time before failures (MTBF) declared by some manufacturers, but the term MTTF is often used for non-repairable products.

Toshiba and many market analysts expect SSDs to begin to gain significant traction in the market in 2009, growing to approximately 10% of the notebook market by 2010, and 25% of the notebook market by 2012. Toshiba expects the value/performance of its MLC NAND-based SSD line-up to help speed the acceptance of solid state storage.

Samples of the new drives will be available in first quarter 2009, with mass production in the second quarter 2009. Toshiba’s new SSDs will be showcased at International CES 2009 in Las Vegas, Nevada from January 8 to 11, 2009

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

Tags: Toshiba, SSD, 43nm, Flash