Toshiba unveils 512GB solid-state drive

Toshiba has unveiled a 512GB solid-state drive.

The company claimed the solid-state drive (SSD) breaks both speed and size records in the notebook SSD market.

The 2.5-inch notebook drive is based on Toshiba's 43nm (nanometre) multi-level cell Nand flash technology, and claims write speeds of up to 200MBps and read speeds of up to 240MBps. Intel has rated its latest 80GB X-25M SSDs at 250MB per second read speeds and up to 70MB per second write speeds.

The drives are scheduled for mass production in the second quarter of 2009, by which stage Toshiba expects SSDs to account for 10 percent of all notebook drives. The company expects this figure to grow to 25 percent by 2012.

Toshiba's drives are available in either 1.8-inch or 2.5-inch form factors.

Toshiba has not released pricing on the new SSDs.

In addition to the 512GB model, Toshiba will also be offering similar drives with 256GB, 128GB and 64GB capacities, in both 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch form factors. Toshiba claimed a mean time to failure of one million hours for all of its new SSDs.

SSD drives, unlike conventional magnetic hard-disk drives, have no moving parts, relying instead on flash-based memory. This results in more rugged, smaller and longer-lasting disks. However, SSDs, to date, have been substantially more expensive than traditional magnetic disk-based hard drives.