back to article Tosh touts world's first half-terabyte laptop SSD

Toshiba has developed what it claims is the world’s first 512GB 2.5in solid-state drive. The firm said its high-capacity SSD is destined for notebooks, gaming PCs and home entertainment systems. Toshiba_512GB_SSD Toshiba's 512GB SSD: capacious Toshiba’s drive has a 3Gb/s SATA interface and a maximum sequential read speed …

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  1. Frank Bough
    Thumb Down

    240Mb/s?

    So, 30MB/s then? Not that hot, is it?

  2. Christian Berger

    Niece market?

    I mean, OK, it's potentionally great for laptops, but couldn't you just use RAM? I mean RAM is cheaper and it doesn't have the many problems that flash memory has.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Black Helicopters

    @ Christian Berger

    One - it's 'niche' market...

    Two - the memory modules on RAM chip aren't of much use for SSD's, for as I understand it, they only retain the information stored on them whilst they are powered. Switch them off, have a power cut, and bye bye data!

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    240MB/s

    @Frank

    According to the Toshiba press release, the "MB" is actually megaBYTE not megabit:

    http://www.toshiba.com/taec/news/press_releases/2008/memy_08_550.jsp

    The footnote next to the first instance of the quoted speeds reads thus:

    "For purposes of measuring read and write speed in this context, 1 Megabyte or MB = 1,000,000 bytes. Read and write speed may vary depending on the controller, read and write conditions, such as file sizes you read and/or write."

    Okay, so it's one of those stupid hard disk manufacturer MB values rounded to a cool 1,000,000 bytes and not 1,048,576 bytes (1024 * 1024) as used everywhere else.

    In terms of performance, with virtually zero seek times in SSDs and those read/write rates, these drives can potentially tinkle on traditional drive technology from a great height. Esp. when SSD optimised OS drivers surface like Sandisk's ExtremeFFS.

    Plus they're perfectly silent and use a fraction of the power. It's a real shame these devices will cost about the same as a small nation's GDP...

    ps - I hate the fact that mbit has recently been further abbreviated to Mb - didn't anyone realise that was already taken?!

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