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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
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- 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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| SSD Pricing -
where does all the money go? |
SSDs are among the most
expensive computer hardware products you will ever buy.
Understanding
the factors which determine SSD costs is often a confusing and irritating
process... |
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...not made any easier when
market prices for identical capacity SSDs can vary more than 100x to 1!
Why is that? ...read
the article | | | |
| ... |
| SSDs - the big picture! |
| Editor:-
StorageSearch.com was the
world's 1st publication to provide continuous editorial coverage and analysis
of SSDs (in 1998) and in the years which have followed we've led the market
through many interesting and confusing times. |
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If you often find yourself
explaining to your VC,
lawyer or non technical BBQ guests why you spend so much time immersed in SSD
web pages - and need a single, simple, not very technical reference to
suggest - this may be the link they need. | | | |
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