[MallyMal]

Toshiba is upping the solid-state drive (SSD) game with new hard drives based upon 43-nanometer multi-level cell NAND technology. The company plans to showcase the first 2.5-inch, 512GB SSD as part of a new SSD roll out at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January.

Toshiba said that, besides the 512GB SSD, it will also offer capacities of 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB, offered in 1.8-inch or 2.5-inch drive enclosures or as SSD flash modules. These new SSDs are said to offer higher read and write speeds of 240 MB per second and 200 MB per second, respectively, due to its MLC controller. AES data encryption will also be included.

Mass production of these new SSDs is expected to begin in the second quarter of 2009. Toshiba seems to have no plans to rest on it laurels in trying to stay competitive in the hot SSD market. It will always have its hands full with Intel, which is good for consumers as it spurs innovation and slowly drives flash memory prices lower.

Original Article

Could someone talk to me about the speed of this drive? How does it compare to Velociraptors or SAS drives?

[CharlesS]

It doesn't seem to be mass-produced yet, so it'd be doubtful that anyone would be able to get one to speed-test at this point. AFAIK, 256 GB SSDs aren't even shipping yet, and Samsung announced those back in May (and Hitachi announced theirs in September).

[Brien]

Where's my 512GB iPhone!

[MallyMal]

How would that 240/200 MB read/write speed compare to Velociraptors or SAS drives?

[CharlesS]

As the 256 GB drives haven't been released yet either, I don't think there are going to be any benchmarks yet.

[mduell]

MLC is the slow/cheap ($1/GB) stuff like the iPhone/iTouch use... but if you put enough of them in parallel, they're pretty speedy.

The performance profile is different than high speed hard disks. Sustained writes are good, but random write performance is usually poor (depends heavily on the controller). Reads are generally quick.

[thechidz]

Ill be picking one of these up probably in about a year, hopefully for a decent price on newegg by then

[CharlesS]

Yeah, and in a year perhaps the prices for the faster and more reliable SLC drives will actually be within the realm of feasibility (right now if you can afford it, it's probably MLC).

[aaanorton]

I saw these at Newegg:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...038&name=250GB

I don't know who OCZ is, but it *looks* like they are in stock (though I haven't tried ordering one).

Can someone speak about the power consumption of these (and similar) drives? I'd really like to be able to power two of them on one USB port. Doable?

[mduell]

You could easily power two SSDs off a USB port, but you'd need an unpowered hub to connect them.

OCZ is a component manufacturer that's popular with the "enthusiast"/neon lights crowd; it's probably short for OverClockerZ or something similar.

[aaanorton]

Originally Posted by mduell 

You could easily power two SSDs off a USB port, but you'd need an unpowered hub to connect them.

Funny you should say that... I'm Googling for a quality mini USB hub right now. Any suggestions that will pass bus power well? I know lots of them advertise this, but know from experience that this is not always the case.

EDIT:

I think I found just the ticket.

[hmurchison2001]

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/IDE/SSD_v...or_Raptor.html

Shows that SSD is clearly the way to go
and if Toshiba's specs are true @ 240MBps
read/200 MBps write then the Velociraptor
would stand no chance. Also keep in mind
that SSD doesn't slow down as it becomes
more full.

[MallyMal]

Very nice. Now I have to wait for the price to come down and also find a way to get them into a Mac Pro. I would love to use one of those as a boot disk and another for scratch for HD video editing.

[hmurchison2001]

Originally Posted by MallyMal 

Very nice. Now I have to wait for the price to come down and also find a way to get them into a Mac Pro. I would love to use one of those as a boot disk and another for scratch for HD video editing.

Yes I'm bullish on SSD. It's very expensive right now but the thing about SSD is it's NAND memory which means each new process shrink doubles capacity and thus has the potential to halve costs.

In fact early next year Intel and Micron are rolling out a new process.

http://www.edn.com/article/CA6565114.html

The 34-nm 32-Gb chips will be manufactured on 300-mm wafers, with each wafer capable of holding approximately 1.6 terabytes of NAND. Measuring 172-square-millimeters (less than the size of a thumbnail), the companies said the 34-nm 32 Gb chip is meant to cost-effectively allow high-density solid-state storage in small form factor applications,

Also, given that Intel and Micron project about 400 dice per wafer, the price of a 32-Gb chip will be just shy of $4, which works out to about 99 cents per GB, making them the first companies to break the $1/GB barrier with this product, compared to today's MLC NAND prices of approximately $2.50/GB – roughly equivalent to the cost of a 54-nm process MLC chip produced on a 300-mm line, or a 45-nm process MLC NAND on a 200-mm line, Objective Analysis explained.

Wow the markup on SSD is crazy. Intel's SSD sell online for what 600+ dollars for an 80GB. That's $8 a gig today and they wonder why there's an oversupply of SSD. Everyone playing at the high end of performance is trying to make fat margins so shop wisely.

Oh yeah the multitasking performance of SSD is one of its killer features.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...px?i=3403&p=15

SSD smokes HDD in some key areas. If I had a Mac Pro with 4 cores I'd consider SSD if I had 8 cores I'd accept nothing less for my boot partition.

Also for shats and giggles check out the high end

www.fusionio.com. These guys are bypassing the storage controller and hooking SSD right up to the PCI Express bus. How's 700 MBps reads and 550 MBps writes sound? It sounds like a game changer to me.

[MallyMal]

Thanks for all of the info. And, yes, I want to try these out in my Mac Pro badly.