Toshiba Announces 256 GB Solid-State Drive

Seems like just yesterday Toshiba announced 256 GB 1.8-inch hard drives; now the company says it's sampling 256 GB solid-state drives.

Truly, the digital storage game is one of near-constant one-ups-manship, with vendors continually announcing new products offering greater amounts of storage at ever-lower per unit costs. Sometimes, the companies just keep rolling out announcements one after the other, without any regard for trying to coordinate them in-house, let along in response to the rest of the industry.

For instance, yesterday Toshiba announced a new 1.8-inch hard drive for media players and ultra-portable PCs that offers capacities up to 250 GB; today the same company announced it is sampling 250 GB flash-based solid-state drives, along with smaller-sized flash modules intended for netbooks and ultra-mobile PCs.

The 250 GB SSD is packed into a 2.5-inch enclosure with a 3 Gb/s SATA interface, as is designed to work as a drop-in replacement for standard 2.5-inch notebook drives. The unit operates on 5 volts and offers a top read speed of 120 MB per second, and a write speed of 70 MB per second.

The flash modules for nettops and ultra-portable notebooks are available in capacities from 8 to 32 GB, and offer read and write speeds of 80 MB/s and 50 MB/s, respectively, and can be used with an SATA interface.

Toshiba is sampling both flash products now, and expects to start mass production on both in the fourth quarter of 2008.