Toshiba plans to address several issues currently keeping SSDs from becoming more widely used. Toshiba is also addressing the concerns with regards to the rewrite limit for multi-level cells used in today’s SSDs. Saito said at the conference that, “If data is efficiently concentrated and stored in caches in an effort to reduce the frequency of rewrites, rewrites on SSDs can be reduced to a number far below 10,000 times in five years, even for heavy PC users."Toshiba expects pricing of 2.5" SSDs will drop 50 percent but that's still 3.2x more than what you pay for a comparable 2.5" HDD.
Other major hurdles for the widespread adoption of SSD drives are the price and capacity current drives offer. Toshiba s addressing the capacity issue by working on miniaturizing the production process it uses from the current 43nm process it introduced in March 2008 to 30nm which it expects to introduce in 2009.
Toshiba will also improve multi-valuing by moving from its current 3-bit-per-cell product to a 4-bit-per-cell product. SanDisk beat Toshiba to market by a month with its 40nm 3-bit-per-cell process in February of 2008.
Toshiba: 25% of notebooks to get SSDs by 2011
Posted on Friday, April 25 2008 @ 1:15 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck