backtop

Hardware Toshiba Announces SSD Lineup
Brandon Hill (Blog) - December 10, 2007 11:06 AM
Print E-mail del.icio.us 27 comment(s) - last by dashrendar.. on Dec 11 at 12:06 PM

  (Source: Toshiba)
Toshiba prepares 32GB, 64GB and 128GB SSDs

The solid-state disk (SSD) market is starting to heat up and a new player is ready to throw its hat into the ring. Toshiba today announced that it will launch a new lineup of multi-level cell (MLC) NAND-based SSDs next year.

The MLC NAND chips used in the drives are built on a 56nm manufacturing process and allow for read speeds of 100MB/sec and write speeds of 40MB/sec. The read speeds are not quite competitive with SSDs from Samsung and Mtron. Write speeds, however, are far below its competitors. Samsung's newest SSDs offer write speeds of 100MB/sec and Mtron SSDs hover around the 90MB/sec mark.

It should be noted, however, that Toshiba and Samsung recently announced a cross-licensing agreement with regards to NAND flash technology. With access to Samsung's NAND flash portfolio, there is definitely room for improvement in read/write speeds for future products.

Toshiba will launch its new SATA II SSDs in capacities of 32GB, 64GB and 128GB. All will be available in 1.8 or 2.5" form-factors and will have an operating life of roughly one million hours.

Toshiba expects to display the drives at CES in January and production-level hardware will first be available during the first quarter of 2008. Production versions of the 128GB drive, however, aren't expected until May 2008.

As is the case with most new SSD announcement, there is no word on pricing for the Toshiba’s new SSDs. Prices have dropped as more players have entered the market, but prices have not come down to the point were mere mortals can afford to drop a 64GB SSD into their laptop.

Hopefully for consumers, 2008 will be the “Year of the SSD” and will be accompanied by deep price cuts as the technology matures.

Comments     Threshold


This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled
Hurry up already.
By MrBungle123 on 12/10/2007 11:41:59 AM , Rating: 5
I can't wait until we start seeing affordable SSD's in the desktop market, 3 or 4 of them in RAID 0 would be insane.




RE: Hurry up already.
By tumby1974 on 12/10/2007 12:40:25 PM , Rating: 2
I work on police car "laptops" for our city's PD department and I can't wait to get these SSDs, and I only need the 32GB ones. Hard drives do not last long in the cars and when one goes bad, we have to ship it to the manufacturer to replace, which takes the computer off the road for at least 2 weeks. Rough driving and extreme temperatures wreck havoc on our car computers and SSDs could be the solution.


RE: Hurry up already.
By jtemplin on 12/10/2007 1:09:22 PM , Rating: 2
Your boys in blue use the Panasonic Toughbook correct?


RE: Hurry up already.
By jtemplin on 12/10/2007 1:31:20 PM , Rating: 4
Looked this up out of curiousity, the Panasonic Toughbook 30 designed for use in police cruisers.

https://www.toughonline.com/features.asp?item=1014

Almost four thousand dollars and uses a traditional 80gb HDD. Id imagine theyd charge almost 5k to use an SSD. Kinda like how dell charges 80 dollars to upgrade a 160gb HDD to a 250gb HDD. Me=oem skeptic...


RE: Hurry up already.
By MrPickins on 12/10/2007 5:03:29 PM , Rating: 1
Wow, and only 512MB of ram standard...


RE: Hurry up already.
By jtemplin on 12/10/2007 9:41:31 PM , Rating: 3
Burnnnn. Well at least the police don't have to pay for it...(insert shift eyes here)


RE: Hurry up already.
By tumby1974 on 12/10/2007 3:39:28 PM , Rating: 2
No. Data911 M5. It's deemed an actual PC, and fits in the glove compartment area, with a touchscreen mounted center of dashboard.


RE: Hurry up already.
By RogueSpear on 12/10/2007 7:19:17 PM , Rating: 2
I've been using ToughBooks in our patrol cars for about seven years now. The hard drives almost never die. In the full rugged models the drive is encased in a shock absorbing (and I assume temperature regulating) gel. We've usually taken units out of service because they're just too old and slow. The first units were P2-400 w/ 256MB. We expanded the RAM to 512 and that bought a couple more years. They hate the cost of these things but every single time we've tried some other sort of "alternative" to the ToughBook, it's been a terrible experience.

A SSD option is fine, but I honestly don't think that it will do a thing for the reliability as far as the ToughBook is concerned. Perhaps it would give some kind of performance boost, but once the various applications are loaded speed isn't an issue.


RE: Hurry up already.
By thornburg on 12/10/2007 1:10:03 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
I work on police car "laptops" for our city's PD department and I can't wait to get these SSDs, and I only need the 32GB ones


Currently available for $300-$500 at Newegg. IDE, Expresscard, and SATA (although the SATAs are on back-order).

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Sub...


By someguy743 on 12/10/2007 12:01:24 PM , Rating: 3
I can't wait til I can get my hands on a 128 GB Samsung SSD at a decent price.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industr...

http://www.samsungssd.com/what_is_ssd/overview.htm...

Give the people what they want! Excellent reliablity, durability, energy efficiency, and read/write performance. No more hard drive crash nightmares! Network admins all over the world will be thrilled when the hard drive becomes obsolete.

Thank you Samsung, Toshiba, MTron and everyone else who's bringing SSDs to market. Start building those huge factories. The hard drive is going extinct and the SSD is taking over! The quicker you can make them cheaper the better. Yeaaa.




By Runiteshark on 12/10/2007 12:30:36 PM , Rating: 2
No I wouldn't... I've only had 2 out of about 300 (all Seagate) die over a period of 3 years. All that had to be done was reimage the drive with the company iso I made with all the crap preloaded on, and it was done. The only data lost was the employees' personal information.

See a good netadmin makes all his users store their crap on their nice 15 drive scuzzie array file server.

When the drives come available for about $52 (what I paid for the bulk drives each), sure, why not.

As for the rest you said, it sounds like it came straight out of a marketing brochure. Hard drives (at least in my experience) don't usually randomly die. One that died was because the idiot who was working with it would kick his computer when Quickbooks wouldn't let him log on in the morning. (time sensitive, shares active only during specific hours). Durability? What are you going to do? Go play soccer with your hard drive? I don't know what kind of work you do, but most of the computers here just sit there and run. Energy efficiency? Hard drives only take about 5-10w (depending on the drive), I don't see how saving a MASSIVE 2-2.5w will save my company a ton of money, especially with the increased expenditure of the drives itself. Lastly, read/write. Again, I don't know what you do, but the Seagate 7200.9's or something to that effect are plenty fast for the software required for a BUSINESS (you know where people work, and not trying to decrease load times on loading the next level on a game).

Oh, and the hard drive going extinct? I think not.

As cool as it would be for say the guys in accounting to have RAID 0 raptors or these, they totally don't need it.


By TomZ on 12/10/2007 12:51:55 PM , Rating: 4
If you're an admin who thinks that nearly all HDD failures are the users' fault, then you have a seriously jaded view.

In my experience, for example, we have a lot of HDDs in a number of stationary desktops and servers. Every now and then, a HDD goes belly up. I don't see any conceivable correlation to user abuse, unless you think just having them turned on is an unreasonalble way to use them.

I also just recently had a HDD die in my relatively new laptop, and I can assure you that this machine has not experienced any abuse ever.

So in my experience, I would say HDD failures, while probably not purely random, are also not very predictable nor avoidable.


By Runiteshark on 12/10/2007 1:20:14 PM , Rating: 2
Perhaps its just me getting lucky with the low amount of drive failures that I've had to endure over the years, but I can say with a smirk that this guy I spoke of really did abuse his machine.

He was reprimanded several times for it, but continued anyway. Whenever he was frustrated he would take it out on the computer, and I don't believe that that really helps the drive in the box. Provided it was a solid state drive, I'm sure it could take more abuse, but regardless, I believe the drive was user caused. I was in a close proximity to the issue in hand, and here is a short transcript of what occurred:

Hi Diane how was your weekend?
-Oh it was fine, how about you (He brings his computer out of standby)
Oh fine, blah blah blah
Ah damn it, this thing takes forever to load (he likes to have a ton of stuff open, way way more then you would expect, 30 explorer windows, 2 firefox windows with 10 tabs each of him browsing the net instead of working like me, and so forth)
-Thats odd, mines pretty quick
Its just mine (kick kick kick, the wonderful sound of the drives platters spinning their last revolutions)
Oh shit, I think I just broke my computer
-Right I'm headed to get coffee

Then I get called over (I was installing a new GigE card into a box 2 cubes away)

While my post was long and arduous to read, that really is what happened. The other drive probably just died of natural causes.

I guess I really am just lucky (knock on wood).


By jtemplin on 12/10/2007 4:34:22 PM , Rating: 2
I don't think you guys are disagreeing here. Hard drive failures in the absence of abuse/misuse are probably random and "normally distributed" in some fashion.

What I wanted to comment on is the phenomenon of Computer Rage. This past semester I worked in the Laboratory for Automation Psychology and Decision Processes. Dr. Kent Norman started this lab some years ago and is very knowledgeable on this subject.

I had the pleasure of working on his survey date file, which has been completed by thousands of people around the world. Some people actually become so enraged that in the heat of the moment, in their passionate rage, will kick, punch, even SHOOT their screen/chassis. Some people will very meticulously destroy their PC, which obviously takes a lot longer than the initial angered reaction.

The link to our lab's computer rage site: http://lap.umd.edu/computer_rage/

Please take our survey, we always love to gain more input on computer
rage!
http://lap.umd.edu/surveys/computer_rage/computer_...


By jadeskye on 12/10/2007 1:17:16 PM , Rating: 2
While i'm extremely excited over the prospect of SSDs in desktops, laptops and general computers i think there will always be hard drives. for example: server farms.

Servers can use hundreds of terrabytes of data and store that too in some cases. while i believe SSDs will reach this capacity and the same affordability as HDDs one day, i think the HDD will continue to see development and we'll see them for a long time to come especially in SSD's early years in the mass market.


Constructive criticism
By jtemplin on 12/10/2007 11:25:23 AM , Rating: 5
This sentence needs work:
The write read are not quite competitive with the latest generation of SSDs from Samsung and Mtron while the write speeds are far behind.

The read and write speeds are not quite competetive with the latest generation of SSDs from Samsung and Mtron. While the read speed closely trails that of Toshiba's competitors, the write speeds are far behind.

How about that?




RE: Constructive criticism
By Brandon Hill (blog) on 12/10/2007 12:11:12 PM , Rating: 2
Thanks for the comments. I rewrote it to make is sound a bit more clear.


RE: Constructive criticism
By jtemplin on 12/10/2007 1:08:22 PM , Rating: 2
Your very welcome, glad I could help :)


RE: Constructive criticism
By MrBungle on 12/10/2007 7:12:27 PM , Rating: 3
This sentence needs work:
Your very welcome, glad I could help :)

You're very welcome, glad I could help! xD

How about that?


Cost?
By dashrendar on 12/10/2007 12:02:25 PM , Rating: 2
How much for one of those bad boys?




RE: Cost?
By TomZ on 12/10/2007 12:08:46 PM , Rating: 1
If you have to ask, then you can't afford it. :o)