Toshiba to launch first 512GB Solid State Drive (SSD)

The drive is based on a 43 nanometer Multi-Level Cell NAND and claims to offer a high level of performance and endurance for use in notebooks as well as gaming and home entertainment systems.

"The solid state drive market is evolving rapidly, with higher performance drives to meet market requirements, and differentiated product families targeted for appropriate applications", said Toshiba Semiconductor VP Kiyoshi Kobayashi.

"This new 43nm SSD family balances value/performance characteristics for its targeted consumer applications, through use of MLC NAND and an advanced controller architecture."

It has a maximum sequential read speed of 240MB per second and maximum sequential write speed of 200MBps meaning faster boot and application loading times. The drive also offers AES data encryption to prevent unauthorized data access.

Samples of the second-gen drives will be available to during the first quarter of 2009 meaning that ultraportable SSD-packing computers, such as the MacBook Air or the Lenovo X300 may offer the larger capacity towards the end of the year but Toshiba doesn't expect to ramp up mass production until the second quarter.