Toshiba Corp, the second largest producer of flash memory on the globe, said on Tuesday that it wanted to become the biggest supplier of solid state drives (SSDs) and in order to achieve that would boost output of SSDs by 15 fold (1500%) over the following two years and would also move the assembly of flash-based storage devices to Philippines from Japan.

Toshiba will start to move production of its solid state drives from Japan to Philippines already in calendar Q2 2009. Initially, the fab in Philippines will produce 64GB, 128GB, 256GB and 512GB SSDs for notebooks based on 43nm NAND flash memory, but eventually the whole range of Toshiba’s flash-powered storage products would be made outside Japan. Transition of SSD assembly to Philippines should help Toshiba to boost output and also reduce costs, reports Reuters news-agency.

Toshiba expects the market of solid state drives to grow tremendously in the next two years and increasing output by 1500% should help the company to address that great demand. If Toshiba’s predictions are correct, then it is logical to expect SSDs to drop in pricing considerably in the next 24 months and the demand towards high-end storage to increase (as it is hard to believe that SSDs will match hard disk drives in terms of per-gigabyte price in the next two years).

While solid state drives provide a number of benefits compared to traditional hard disk drives, including higher performance, lower power consumption and shock resistance, they have drawbacks too: each flash cell can only be written for a limited amount of time. In addition, SSDs are considerably more expensive that HDDs, which is particularly negative amid the global economic recession.

Tags: Toshiba, SSD, Flash