If the fact that Toshiba is now selling retail SSDs to the consumer surprises you, it should. For some time now, the SSD industry has had its eye on Toshiba as they seemed to get caught behind the eight ball. From our perspective, the only Toshiba SSDs we had reported on were the client THNSN 128GB SATA 2 mSATA SSD found in our Toshiba Z830 Ultrabook Review, and the ‘SandForce Driven’ Toshiba 6Gbps SSD that we briefly spoke of in our MBA Ivy Bridge Mid-2012 Report. For the most part, Toshiba was nowhere to be found in the consumer SSD market, at least until Q3 of this year, and their presence in client systems is still not as those in the SSD world might have predicted. Toshiba’s importance in the SSD market cannot be overlooked and Wayne Eisenberg (formerly of SMART and now OCZ) provided reason in his article, ‘Examining the SSD Industry – Benefits of Owning The Fab’. He spoke of the main NAND manufacturers being Samsung, Toshiba, Hynix, SanDisk, Intel and Micron, and these manufacturers having the ability to shape the SSD industry, much to the disadvantage of third party SSD manufacturers. In a nut shell, those who ‘Own the Fab’ could manufacture and sell SSDs at a lower price than third party manufacturers, forcing them to realign their products in areas that are more likely to support their revenue goals. Examples of this are evident with Patriot and Corsair who have changed product direction slightly, as well as OCZ who seems to be moving more into the enterprise SSD side of things than consumer.



Link: The SSD Review