Toshiba developed NAND flash memory in 1987, and as its inventor, lead the industry ahead of its competitors in commercializing it and adding value to the products in which it had been employed. By utilizing its advanced technologies and experience, Toshiba has been pursing unique product development based on its design policy, which has as its aim the development of products that are easy for customers to use over long periods of time.

The longer life of Toshiba SSDs is facilitated by our proprietary technology that reduces the frequency of write requests made to the NAND flash memory. SSD life expectancy in general depends greatly on the number of data writes. Therefore, if the frequency of write requests can be controlled and reduced by making the data write process more efficient, longer SSD life expectancy can be achieved. In addition to this technology, Toshiba has adopted other technologies to ensure high reliability and durability, with features such as the provision to the whole system with wear leveling, and the reduction or prevention of various failures.

Another feature of Toshiba SSDs is that they are tolerant of small pieces of data called file fragments. If a computer system is used for a long time, many file fragments are generated in its data storage devices, and this may reduce data processing speed. Toshiba SSDs are less likely to cause the system to slow down in such situations, so you can use them for longer and more easily.

In addition, we have striven to realize high capacity SSDs and have succeeded in developing SSDs with the largest capacity in the world, 512 GB, which has been achieved by the stacking of NAND flash memory. This technique has been further enhanced, and now we can offer SSDs with a terabyte capacity if the market requires it.

Features of Toshiba SSDs : High Capacity

Toshiba SSDs include strengths such as long life expectancy, being tolerant of file fragments, and having larger capacities that our competitors’ devices. This has been made possible by the control technique employed for the SSD flash controller. The development of this technology was our most difficult job. We first collected samples of access data from several million users’ and developed an optimized control algorithm based on such samples. We then integrated our unique SSD controller, which has been customized so as to achieve maximum performance when used with computers, into an SSD. This SSD controller has enabled Toshiba SSDs to achieve the industry’s highest PCMark05 score, which is a computer performance benchmark.

* Toshiba SSDs are equipped with an integrated SSD controller that is designed to get the best performance out of an SSD when it is used in a PC. Toshiba SSDs have achieved the highest standards in the SSD industry with PCMark05, a commonly used benchmark tool designed to test the performance of PCs.

We started the development of SSDs at Toshiba in 2005. After nearly two years of fundamental research, development moved on to the commercialization stage in 2008. Currently, Toshiba is manufacturing the second generation of SSDs, and a major theme for them is extending their life expectancy above that of earlier products. A current theme is the raising of read speeds even further. Each time a new product has been developed, another issue is raised—this is common in development work. The fact that we were able to bring our first SSDs to market about eighteen months after the start of marketing planning may be due to the will of our engineers to overcome obstacles.

The toughest part was the development of a control technique to reduce the number of writes. Without the development of this technique, the current success of Toshiba SSDs would not be possible. By making the read/write process more efficient, we also succeeded in further reducing power consumption. We believe that Toshiba SSDs are one of the solutions for additional energy savings for office equipment.

Toshiba SSDs, which offer high data transfer rate and resistance to environmental factors, can be used in a variety of devices and applications, including office equipment, servers, and TVs, in addition to in notebooks and netbooks. Since servers in particular require fast data access, SSDs with outstanding data transfer rate will be used for them. For computers that serve as clients, as demand for low cost storage will further increase, it is expected that this will accelerate the penetration of small capacity and low cost SSDs.

At the same time, HDD will be used for multimedia PCs and hard-disc video recorders for home use, and there will be a demand for larger capacities here. In this way, it is expected that the data storage market will further divided into separate markets for SSDs and HDDs. By taking the full advantages of Toshiba’s comprehensive expertise, we will strive to further enhance our SSDs aiming to offer performance and features from our customers’ perspective to meet their requirements, whatever the purpose for their use of SSDs is.

The last message I can confidently give to all of our users as one of the developers of Toshiba’s SSDs is that they are extremely robust. Because we have evaluated and designed SSDs bearing in mind all kinds of problems and accidents that may happen to mobile equipment and other devices during use, you can use them with confidence for any purpose. In addition, since we have been continuously enhancing our SSDs’ price-competitiveness, performance, and reliability, we are confident that Toshiba SSDs have achieved user-friendliness and performance of a level that no other company can offer. Toshiba SSDs are the fruits of our device and digital technologies, which we have acquired over a long period of time.

Experience for yourself the user-friendliness and reliability of Toshiba SSDs—once you have tried them, you will wonder how you did without them.