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Flash Modules come in 8GB, 16GB and 32GB

The world of SSDs has grown a bit with Toshiba's announcement that it is now offering a 256GB SSD using multi-level cell (MLC) technology. By using MLC technology, the SSDs are able to offer competitive read and write speeds at a lower price point than single-level cell (SLC) SSDs.

Toshiba says that the 256GB SSD has a read speed of 120MBps and a write speed of 70MBps. The interface for the drive is the standard SATA 3Gb/s interface. Toshiba's 256GB SSD is built using a form factor measuring 70.6mm L x 53.6mmW x 3mm H.

Other benefits of using MLC technology are parallel data transfers and wear leveling. The 256GB drive is also accompanied by a trio of lower capacity, smaller Flash Modules that Toshiba intends for the netbook and consumer electronics market.

The Flash Modules are available in 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB densities. Toshiba's Flash Modules are built on a form factor measuring 50mm x 30mm and have a maximum read speed of 80MBps and a maximum write speed of 50MBps. Toshiba reports that samples of the SSD and the Flash Modules are available now. Mass production on the line is expected to begin in Q4 2008.

Toshiba isn’t the first SSD maker to start producing SSDs using MLC technology. Samsung has MLC SSDs in volume production now in 128GB and 64GB capacities. Toshiba and Samsung's MLC SSDs match write speeds with 70MBps. Toshiba's new SSDs offer a significantly faster read speed when compared to Samsung's MLC products with a read speed of 90MBps.

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By therealnickdanger on 9/26/2008 1:15:01 PM , Rating: 5
Controller, controller, controller! I hope they learn from the mistakes of others to avoid the delay-write fiasco and I also hope they price their products appropriately given the dominance of Intel.




By therealnickdanger on 9/26/2008 1:15:38 PM , Rating: 1
spell fail:

"buying as SSD" should be:
"buying a SSD"


By amanojaku on 9/26/2008 1:35:14 PM , Rating: 1
If you write it the way you say it then it would be "buying an SSD," as in ess. Unless you pronounce it as "sid."


By therealnickdanger on 9/26/2008 5:02:08 PM , Rating: 1
Well, it depends. You wouldn't say "buying an solid state disk". I actually looked this up after correcting my spelling mistake because I was just curious anyway. I believe the jury is out on the appropriate way to use "a" and "an" with acronyms - the reason being that acronyms are "lazy grammar" anyway. So in the end, I'm not sure I care! :P


By Clauzii on 9/27/2008 12:42:44 PM , Rating: 1
As I know it, it is 'a car', 'a house', 'a rocket' and it's 'an ice-cream', 'an interface', 'an orange'. Which means that it is 'an' if a vowel is the first letter of the object.

So it must be 'a SSD drive' then? If a drive is optical is it then 'a optical drive' and not 'an optical drive' (since it's still 'a .. drive'?


By tynopik on 9/27/2008 3:46:02 PM , Rating: 5
> So it must be 'a SSD drive' then?

it goes by the SOUND of the first syllable

in this case, the first syllable is pronounced 'ESS' (as in ess-ess-dee), which starts with a vowel SOUND

thus it is AN SSD

SCSI is pronounced 'scuzzy' which starts with a consonant sound and thus it is A SCSI drive

> If a drive is optical is it then 'a optical drive' and not 'an optical drive' (since it's still 'a .. drive'

no, it always applies to the word immediately follow it, so it would be AN optical (whatever)


By Clauzii on 9/28/2008 1:00:12 AM , Rating: 2
Thanks :)


By Calin on 9/30/2008 6:18:18 AM , Rating: 2
Then how do you say (and how do you write):
"Your spelling is wrong, it needs a 'S'"
or
"Your spelling is wrong, it needs an 'S'"
?


By therealnickdanger on 10/1/2008 4:25:56 PM , Rating: 2
*head asplode*


By Clauzii on 10/1/2008 7:56:52 PM , Rating: 2
I think I've learned something: It's "an S" since the S is pronounced "Ess"


By sxr7171 on 9/28/2008 10:11:13 PM , Rating: 2
Simple. If the first syllable of a word when pronounced has a vowel sound use "an".


By amanojaku on 9/26/2008 1:36:54 PM , Rating: 3
Forgot to give you kudos for attempting to correct yourself. Not many people would both. And I don't get why people are rating you down for attempting to correct your own post!


By amanojaku on 9/26/2008 1:37:48 PM , Rating: 2
Great, spelling errors of my own! It was supposed to be "Not many people would bother."


By Performance Fanboi on 9/26/2008 1:40:41 PM , Rating: 2
Probably accidental downrates - the downraters are thinking it is the spelling/grammer police again and failing to notice that it is the OP making the correction.

Note: Add me as the 12,463,924th person to want an edit button.


By B3an on 9/26/2008 2:03:31 PM , Rating: 5
No it's just that it's a pointless post that no one wants to read. Unless someone makes massive spelling errors or uses the wrong words, then people can easily make out what that person meant to say.


By Clauzii on 9/27/2008 12:46:01 PM , Rating: 2
OK, I'm 12,463,925 then.. :D


pricing?
By AddX on 9/27/2008 3:51:28 PM , Rating: 2
And how about the price of those new MLC SSDs?

All features are great but the price is the weakest point in SSD




RE: pricing?
By shin0bi272 on 9/27/2008 6:36:13 PM , Rating: 2
I would think that the fact that your drive will die due to being written to too many times and that the write speed is slower than a regular 7200rpm drive would be the worst points of SSDs.


RE: pricing?
By icanhascpu on 9/27/2008 10:30:26 PM , Rating: 2
Write speed? Who cares? Video editors arnt (shouldnt) be getting this drive for write speeds.

People care about read speeds, snappyness, and high I/O THEN write speeds. A drive will write MUCH more than it will read. You dont need to reinstall a game to get it to run everyt time you open it.


RE: pricing?
By icanhascpu on 9/27/2008 10:33:28 PM , Rating: 4
wtb edit button request #256745459

That should be "A drive will read MUCH more than it will write . "


RE: pricing?
By Quiescent on 9/28/2008 3:26:16 AM , Rating: 2
Yep. That's one thing I love about having an SSD... Not to mention the fact that I took the defragger out of my XP install because I don't even need to defrag. I have been going on 10 months now with an XP install, and still everything responds as snappy as if it were a fresh install of Windows, granted the Windows folder is a mess, my temp folders have a big load of junk in them, and I simply do not do any clean ups, so I have little space left on the drive, but it works so beautifully that I just use my SDHC for all the other stuff. And the SSD and SDHC works in harmony, and I am a happy EeePC 4G Surf user.


Just waiting for the virus.....
By kilkennycat on 9/26/2008 5:55:34 PM , Rating: 2
...targeted to nullify the effect of wear-levelling firmware and to wear out (quietly in background)sufficient chunks of the memory in a SSD to make it useless.

Please remember that the manufacturer claims of >N-million write-cycles and 10 years data retention are NOT COINCIDENT. There is a write-cycle count vs data-retention-time profile that ALL the manufacturers of SSDs seem very reluctant indeed to make public!! Many conventional EEprom families have this profile either in their data sheets or their publicly-available reliability data. Typically such profiles have a 10-year retention at 10,000 write-cycles and maybe a few days retention at 1 million cycles!!. And with the very high cell-densities/very thin dielectric layers in modern SSDs, this particular problem is magnified -- hence the so-called "wear-leveling" algorithms. For example, suppose that a SSD has some form of warning mechanism to indicate when a group of cells is about to forget their retained data, and suppose that the disk is sufficiently full that the wear algorithm cannot help because there are no more (data-)empty or unexhausted cells available, then what can the user do, short of copying all data to a genuine hard-disk and dumping the SSD? A conventional Hard-disk has all sorts of failure mechanisms, but none where the stored data can gradually seep away (by leakage) even when the disk is not accessed !!

SSDs are fine for long-term program/data storage with minimum rewrites. They are NOT fine in any application which has frequent (and unknown number of) re-writes -- e.g: a Windows OS C: drive with Windows applications and utilities and particularly if it includes on-drive virtual memory.




RE: Just waiting for the virus.....
By PandaBear on 9/26/2008 11:50:52 PM , Rating: 2
Nobody is reluctant to provide such data, but the answer is: it depends.

Typical SLC based NAND has 100k cycle, with wear leveling it depends on your write profile. Could be 100 years if you never write, could be 1 month if you write continuously in random fashion. How many write? Depends on single sector or multiple sectors, etc. That's why everyone wants to develop a standardized matrix for measuring performance.

A correctly implemented SSD is fine for windows, but it cost money. Take a look at Intel's X25, it works fine.


RE: Just waiting for the virus.....
By kilkennycat on 9/27/2008 12:32:51 AM , Rating: 3
quote:
Nobody is reluctant to provide such data, but the answer is: it depends.


Er, can you please post the URLs for the Write-cycle-count vs data-retention-time profile for the memory-cells in any of the current SSD products? Thank you. ( The Intel profiles for the X25 series would be the most revealing, since Intel is likely to have the best quality control.)

quote:
A correctly implemented SSD is fine for windows, but it cost money. Take a look at Intel's X25, it works fine.


Sure, sure... And for how long before system flakiness shows up?? Unless the SSD has a very sophisticated cell threshold-monitoring system and the ability to report problems directly to the user, the first symptoms of SSD cell data-retention problems will be system-flakiness with erratic system crashes etc, particularly if the SSD is acting as the system "virtual-disk". As you probably know, the root cause of flaky operation in any PC is the most difficult to track down and usually requires patient elimination by swapping out system components one by one. Any PC component that can exhibit this type of error due to limitations of its inherent technology should never be used as a core system component.


RE: Just waiting for the virus.....
By icanhascpu on 9/27/08, Rating: 0
RE: Just waiting for the virus.....
By Quiescent on 9/28/2008 3:36:06 AM , Rating: 2
In response to everyone's post on this topic: Do you believe in global warming too?

I see too much exaggeration on this topic. OMG guys! My SSD is going to die in 1 year! OMG NO WEI! I found it would die in 0975379204765075 years.

A faulty harddrive is no better than a faulty SSD, all the hype on the wear leveling on SSDs is out of whack! A good SSD will have no problems within the lifetime of the technology lifespan. By the time your SSD dies, you will have a new one out that's even better. Of course learn to back up everything. You NEED to do that for any kind of drive. You could have bought that wonderful 500GB 32mb cache Seagate harddrive, put all your data on it, just to find out a week later that it failed. Backing up your data is for redundancy, and backing up your data is safe, no matter what kind of drive you have! And I have a redundancy of 2 back ups, 1 being online, and the other being on a harddrive.


By Quiescent on 9/28/2008 11:12:04 AM , Rating: 2
Edit: Do you believe in ALL the hype over global warming too? This is basically the seem aspects of what has happened to the wear leveling of SSDs.

Edit 2: Technology lifespan can be a very long time, I'm talking about until something drastic that comes out that is worlds better than what you currently have. Not to mention that a lot of people tend to stick with their harddrives until something like this happens, for instance, you all probably stuck with your 250GB and 500GB harddrives, impatiently waiting in excitement for the 1TB harddrive to come out.


price?
By chris2618 on 9/26/2008 1:18:28 PM , Rating: 5
Nothing mentioned in the article.

Toshiba:"look at this its brilliant it can do this it can do that"
Customer: "that sounds good, how much does it cost"
Toshiba: "well its about (cough) dollars"




RE: price?
By inighthawki on 9/26/2008 1:34:28 PM , Rating: 2
lol yeah i can't wait for this information. Lately they've all been boasting their amazing read/write achievements, then announce the 32GB version at $900. Sure, of course, SOMONE will buy it, and that's good for the rest of us too, but i just hope that the $900 price tag has nothing wo do with trying to make extra money. If they get the price down lower a whole lot more people are interested in buying this technology including myself in the next couple of years (if the price is reasonable)


Price
By TheFace on 9/26/2008 4:14:00 PM , Rating: 2
They have to price it competitively with the Intel offerings, especially since the Intel SSD is supposed to deliver much faster read specs and similar write specs.




"Intel is investing heavily (think gazillions of dollars and bazillions of engineering man hours) in resources to create an Intel host controllers spec in order to speed time to market of the USB 3.0 technology." -- Intel blogger Nick Knupffer











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