Toshiba To Showcase 512GB Solid State Drive At CES

The race for the first Terabyte SSD is heating up as Toshiba announced that it will start selling 2.5-inch 512GB NAND-based models by the second quarter of 2009 although the price has been unannounced.

The drive which is aimed at the upper segment of the storage market is manufactured using Toshiba's own proprietary 43nm process and is based on Multi Level Cell technology to ensure a higher performance (compared to Single level cell).

Toshiba will demonstrate the drive at next years International CES 2009 in Las Vegas in January next year. The Japanese technology company will also launch 64GB, 128GB and 256GB models in 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch formats.

The drive can reach a maximum sequential read speed of 1.92Gbps and maximum sequential write speed of 1.6Gbps with the added benefit that the drive comes with AES data encryption to prevent unauthorised data access.

SSDs are expected to own 25 percent of the notebook storage market by 2012 as their prices tumble while their capacity increase up from 10 percent in 2010.

Should the pace at which their price/capacity decrease remain stable, we should expect 256GB drives to retail under £100 by the end of next year.

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