While solid-state drives (SSDs) aren’t the most popular storage medium in notebook computers right now, they are expected to grow significantly in the near future. Toshiba Semiconductor is betting that SSD drives grow significantly over the next three years and is enhancing capacity and reducing costs to grab that growing market.

Toshiba Semiconductor President Shozo Saito said at a seminar that he expects a full quarter of all notebooks shipped to be equipped with SSDs by 2011. Toshiba expects the SSD market to grow 133% every year on average through 2010 and Toshiba says its building capacity faster than that.

Toshiba plans to address several issues currently keeping SSDs from becoming more widely used. Toshiba is also addressing the concerns with regards to the rewrite limit for multi-level cells used in today’s SSDs. Saito said at the conference that, “If data is efficiently concentrated and stored in caches in an effort to reduce the frequency of rewrites, rewrites on SSDs can be reduced to a number far below 10,000 times in five years, even for heavy PC users."

Other major hurdles for the widespread adoption of SSD drives are the price and capacity current drives offer. Toshiba s addressing the capacity issue by working on miniaturizing the production process it uses from the current 43nm process it introduced in March 2008 to 30nm which it expects to introduce in 2009.

Toshiba will also improve multi-valuing by moving from its current 3-bit-per-cell product to a 4-bit-per-cell product. SanDisk beat Toshiba to market by a month with its 40nm 3-bit-per-cell process in February of 2008.

The price premium for SSDs compared to 2.5-inch Hard drives is expected to drop to a 3.2 times premium, roughly half of what it is now according to Toshiba.