Toshiba to Debut 512-Gbyte SSDs at CES

[theRepublic]

Toshiba to Debut 512-Gbyte SSDs at CES

12.18.08

by Brian Heater

Toshiba on Thursday announced another big step in the industry-wide adoption of solid state drives--the first 2.5-inch 512GB SSD. The drive will make its public debut at CES in January.

The company will also be debuting a number of different capacity SSD drives--64-, 128, and 256GB drives, available in either 1.8-inch or 2.5-inch form factors. The drives feature MLC controllers, read speeds of 240 Mbytes/s, and write speeds of 200 Mbytes/s.

The drives also contain AES data encryption.

"The solid state drive market is evolving rapidly, with higher performance drives to meet market requirements, and differentiated product families targeted for appropriate applications," said MKiyoshi Kobayashi, vice president of Toshiba Corporation's semiconductor company, in a statement. "This new 43nm SSD family balances value/performance characteristics for its targeted consumer applications, through use of MLC NAND and an advanced controller architecture."

Samples will be available in the first quarter of 2009, with mass production beginning the second quarter.

Source

It seems the technology is coming along nicely.  I wonder how expensive they are going to be.

Any predictions on when we are going to see the industry move away from hard drives to SSDs?