Toshiba to launch solid-state drives

 

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By Barry Collins and Reuters

Posted on 10 Dec 2007 at 08:49

Toshiba has announced that it will start manufacturing flash-based solid-state drives for notebook PCs, as it seeks to create new sources of demand for flash memory chips.

The world's No 2 maker of NAND-type flash memory says its solid-state drives will range in capacity from 32-128GB, and that it will mass produce the 1.8-inch and 2.5 inch drives in May 2008.

Companies such as Samsung and Toshiba partner, SanDisk, have been producing solid-state drives for nearly a year. However, their limited capacities and relatively expensive price per gigabyte have restricted their appeal.

By pushing the capacity to 128GB, Toshiba may start tempting more businesses to dispose of machines with traditional hard disks and consider the more robust solid-state alternatives.

However, the hard disk isn't going down without a fight. Earlier this year, Hitachi announced its new current perpendicular-to-the-plane giant magnetoresistive (CPP-GMR) technology, which it claims will boost single hard disk capacity to 4 terabytes by 2010.