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Toshiba

Toshiba is a world leader and innovator in pioneering high technology, a diversified manufacturer and marketer of advanced electronic and electrical products spanning digital consumer products; electronic devices and components; power systems, including nuclear energy; industrial and social infrastructure systems; and home appliances. Toshiba was founded in 1875, and today operates a global network of more than 490 companies, with 203,000 employees worldwide and annual sales surpassing 6.3 trillion yen (US$77 billion). Visit Toshiba's web site at www.toshiba.co.jp

see also:- Toshiba - editor mentions on STORAGEsearch.com and Toshiba's SSD site

  • editor's comments:- January 2012 - Toshiba is a leading supplier of flash memory and 1 of nearly 100 companies in the SSD notebook market. Toshiba rejoined the top SSD companies list recently based on search metrics in the 4th quarter of 2011.

    Toshiba was a pioneer in the subminiature hard drive market (having shown the 1st 0.85" hard drive in January 2004) but despite Toshiba having the biggest market share in the 1.8" HDD market - the company had mostly failed to fire the imagination of the SSD market upto about 2010 - due to its strong focus on the notebook SSD market - which grew more slowly during 2006 to 2010 than most most vendors had anticipated.

    Since 2010 the main context in which Toshiba has appeared in our SSD pages has been with regard to technology partnerships with other SSD companies.

    For example Toshiba was an investor in (and supplier to) Violin, supplies flash to Texas Memory Systems and has shared investments in flash wafer fabs with SanDisk.

Toshiba milestones from recent SSD Market History

In May 2008 - Toshiba acquired approximately $30 million of shares in Mtron.

In September 2008 - Toshiba sampled a 256GB 2.5" SATA MLC flash SSD with R/W speeds of 120 / 70 MB/s.

In December 2008 - Toshiba said it will sample a new family of MLC flash SSDs with 256GB capacity in 2.5" and 128GB capacity in 1.8" form factors in Q1 2009.

In January 2009 - Toshiba announced it will start volume production of dual port SAS SLC flash SSDs in Q2 2009. The 2.5" SSDs will have 100GB capacity, and 25,000 read IOPS, and 20,000 write IOPS. One of the enabling factors for the high write IOPS is the use of a non-volatile cache - which was predicted in StorageSearch.com's article - the Flash SSD Performance Roadmap. This brings the number of oems who have announced SAS SSDs to 6. See SSD Buyers Guide table for the full list.

In May 2009 - Toshiba announced it is offering 512GB SSDs as an option in notebooks for the Japanese market. The new, Toshiba-developed 512GB SSD employs a 2-bit-per-cell MLC flash memory - which gives 4x the capacity of SLC flash used in industrial and enterprise SSDs for the same silicon wafer footprint. One of the failures of the SSD market in 2008 was the low performance of SSDs integrated in notebooks. Toshiba's new notebook seems to address that market failure . The company says its new SSD controller boosts data throughput figures of 230MB/s reads and 180MB/s writes.

In September 2009 - A report in DIGITIMES said that Toshiba has ordered flash memory card controllers from ITE Tech to diversify its supplier base.

In January 2010 - Toshiba announced it is sampling 128GB mSATA MLC SSD modules (30mm x 50.95mm x 4.75mm ) aimed at the netbook PC market. Sequential R/W speeds are 180MB/s and 70MB/s respectively. Weight is 9g.

In April 2010 - Violin Memory announced it had received a significant investment from Toshiba.

In April 2011 - Toshiba announced it was sampling SmartNAND - 24nm flash memory chips (with upto 64GB capacity) with integrated ECC controllers to simplify the design of consumer products which need storage.

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