Toshiba Begins Mass Production of MLC NAND Solid State Drives

Toshiba America Electronic Components Inc. (TAEC) announced its first multi-level cell (MLC) NAND-flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs) have started mass production. The initial models to begin shipping this month are 128GB drives in a lightweight, 15 gram embedded module form factor.

"Our first customer for these drives will be the PC Division of Toshiba Corp., in Japan, which will be the first to feature a 128GB SSD in a notebook PC," said Scott Nelson, vice president, memory for TAEC. "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."

To achieve performance levels of 100Mbps read and 40Mbps write in these first generation drives, Toshiba utilized a SATA II interface and an innovative MLC controller supporting fast read-write speed, parallel data transfer, and wear-leveling. As a result, Toshiba SSDs achieve overall PC Benchmark scores that are better than 5,400 rpm and 7,200rpm HDDs and comparable to selected SATA SLC NAND SSDs. The SSD drives excel in indows Vistaboot speed, application loading, general usage and virus scan operations. Compared to hard disk drives, SSDs realize a number of advantages that address needs in the mobile computing market for performance, ruggedness, and lightweight, compact form factors.