Toshiba, Samsung in race to ship 256GB solid-state drives

Toshiba will begin shipping a 256GB solid-state drive, matching Samsung, its bigger, badder rival.

Another nail in the hard-disk-drive coffin? Well, not quite. But Toshiba's drive rivals magnetic drives in size while delivering better performance.

Solid-state drives are more expensive than hard-disk drives but are also generally more power efficient and faster.

Toshiba is trying to keep pace with the 800-pound SSD gorilla, South Korea-based Samsung. Samsung is the largest flash memory chip supplier in the world and has stated in the past that it would sample a 256GB SSD in September. Toshiba is ranked No. 2.

And the two companies are duking it out in more ways than this: both are also vying for SanDisk, the largest maker of retail flash memory drives.

Dell, to date, has used mostly Samsung SSDs, as has Apple. Dell has said in the past that in tests of an SSD in a Latitude notebook, it saw a 35 percent overall system performance increase over a standard 2.5-inch 5400rpm notebook hard drive--the type of hard disk drive used in ultraportable notebooks today.

The Toshiba drive delivers a maximum read speed of 120MB per second and maximum write speed of 70MB per second using a high-speed SATA 3-gigabit-per-second interface.

Like Samsung, Micron, and Intel, Toshiba is using multi-level cell (MLC) technology in its high-capacity drives. An MLC memory cell structure allows drive makers to build larger capacity drives at lower cost but it is not as fast as single-level cell (SLC), nor inherently as reliable. (SLC solid state drives are used currently in laptops such as the Apple MacBook Air and ThinkPad X300.)

Toshiba, like Samsung, says it has developed a controller chip that mitigates the shortcomings of MLC. The "MLC controller...achieves higher read-write speeds, parallel data transfers, and wear leveling," the company said. Wear leveling reduces the "pounding" on one spot--that could wear out the cell--by spreading out the writes over many different cells.

(Credit: Toshiba)

Toshiba has plenty of other company in the high-capacity SSD market, too. Intel says it will ship a 160GB SSD in the fourth quarter, and Micron has stated that it plans to have a 256GB SSD in the same time frame. STEC already ships drives in this capacity.

Samples of Toshiba's 2.5-inch SSD are available now, with mass production following in the fourth quarter, the company said. SSDs currently come in two sizes: smaller 1.8-inch form factors and slightly larger 2.5-inch designs.

No pricing was given.

[Lerianis]

How expensive is it going to be? If it's under 200 dollars, then I will buy it. Anymore than that, however..... forget it!

[steve2112]

I had heard their is a limit to how many times you can read/write to this type of memory, is this fact or fiction.

[therealbean]

It's fact. This is what the "wear leveling" in the article refers to. See above the table for details.

[ejeon1989]

If these companies really want SSD's to become more mainstream, they have to drop the prices down significantly. I mean sure, prices have gone down a lot since the first SSD's, but until they can truly match the Gigabyte Per Buck ratio that current mechanical drives can offer, I don't see SSD's replacing current hard drives just yet. On the bright side, they have caught up on storage capacity rather quickly. If I remember correctly, the first 1GB mechanical hard drive was as large as a bookshelf!

[BigGuns149]

Somehow I don't think they are going to have to match mechanical drives in price per GB to become mainstream. Especially on laptops the performance benefits of a good SSD will likely trump price and capacity advantages for mechanical drives. It is a bit like people said they wouldn't buy an LCD monitor until they were on par with CRTs pricewise. We know how that turned out.

At least within the laptop space I see SSDs going mainstream long before they are on par with HDDs pricewise. Millions of laptops have already been sold with SSDs already. Most have been small netbooks like the eeePC, but there is a already a growing cadre of early adopters that are buying them. Provided you don't store video on the machine a 64GB drive is enough for most people. It is only a matter of time before 512GB SSDs hit the market driving down the prices of the smaller models.

Furthermore, the prices have already came down significantly. As production of cheaper lower quality MLC based SSDs have grown in popularity, their price has dropped to ~$200 for 64GB and rapidly falling. The trick like with all technology typically isn't about making the good stuff cheap, but about creating cheaper versions of the enterprise stuff with lower QC and lower grade technology (ie. slower transfer speeds). Most people ignorantly will consider all SSDs as being created equal and think they are getting an absolute steal of a deal.

[Dango517]

Watch these closely. Mechanical drives have needed a replacement for years and these are it! Thou reliability problems still are apparent the industry is in full speed ahead mode to get these drives to market at a reasonable cost. The reason your paying for so much RAM and at a fairly high cost is because your hard drive is sooo slooow. These are a glimpse into the future and unfortunately still pretty much in the Beta stage. Soon, bye, bye, SATA, PATA and IDE drives. Hello SSDs!

[BigGuns149]

Have you ever actually seen an SSD? I guess not. Virtually all of the SSDs I have seen connect through SATA. The SATA spec is designed to upscale to SATA/600, which is far faster than even the fastest SSDs on the market. Eventually SATA will be obsolete, but that is far far into the future. SSDs are likely to be commonplace long before we come to that point.

Furthermore, not everyone agrees that SSDs are even more reliable. They certainly are quieter and at least for the better models quite a bit faster, but beyond that a lot of what people think they know is either wrong or controversial.

[lawrencep93]

I hope they continue down the road of SSD's.
I hope they can get 1TB SSD's which would be cool.

[iff2mastamatt]

Just bought 1TB HD. It may not be the fastest, but it works fine for me.

[RenoDavid]

Well, of course, this is the future. It's a no-brainer. Like any technology product, It's just a matter of price getting DOWN to a reasonable level and capacity UP to a usable level. I don't think many people are still using those compactflash microdrives, are they??