Toshiba To Launch First 512GB Solid State Drive

designperfection9 writes "Toshiba said Thursday that it will show off a new line up of NAND-flash-based solid state drives with the industry's first 2.5-inch 512GB 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."

Comments

Random read/write?

[Timothy Brownawell]

I only see numbers for sequential access (240MB/s read, 200MB/s write). I don't suppose anyone knows how it does for random read/write speed?

Re:Newegg Special Price!

[Rene S. Hollan]

IIRC, Islam also forbids the lending of money at interest. Whereas we in the U.S. are used to a lender taking a security interest in property purchased with the help of a loan, people who subscribe to faiths where lending at interest is forbidden solve the problem by the lender taking a depreciating ownership interest in the property, sharing proportionately in it's change in value (up or down), while the loan is being paid off. The purchaser's monthly payment goes partially toward purchasing more of the property and partially toward renting the part s/he does not own. Rather clever actually.

Re:And the cost is what?

[mcrbids]

Even if solid-state drives are expensive as hell and not much better than current mechanical/magnetic hard drives right now, I don't expect them to stay that way so this is a step in the right direction.

The fact that SSD devices can compete with Hard Disks today shows not just excellent growth, but purely awe-inspiring growth. Despite being a much smaller marketplace than the magnetic HD marketplace, SSD storage has almost caught up with magnetic Hard Drives.

To show what an incredible accomplishment this is, you need to really understand exactly what this graph actually means.

It shows how hard disk capacity has grown since 1980. Yeah, it's gotten bigger every year... whoopdie doo, right? Notice that this is a logarithmic graph. Each line is 10x the line before, so you really don't see the significance of this, so I rewrote the graph in a "real" scale.

What previously looked like a smooth, predictable growth actually represents a cliff of growth. Capacity has grown so fast that it's been a challenge to find uses for this much storage. We've had to re-invent the meaning of what is a computer in order to make use of so much new found power - over and over, and over again.

And yet, despite having a dramatically smaller marketshare, much less R&D, SSD storage has managed to all-but catch up to this fast-moving target. This isn't just cool, it's incredible. Every year, SSD drives get a little closer to parity with their spinning cousins.

I have an 8 GB thumb drive, but I also still have a couple 1 and 3 GB drives from a few years back on the shelf. This kind of growth is simply astounding!