Mannerisms

Micron says it will start mass production of SSDs in Q108, Toshiba says it will start mass production in May 2008.

So far only Samsung is both a maker of NAND flash chips as well as an SSD maker, though SanDisk, of course, another maker of SSDs has a big stake in Toshiba’s NAND flash factories under their Flash Alliance joint venture.

But the other vendors of SSDs are companies which package NAND chips into the SSD format. Therefore they have no control over their primary cost i.e. the chips.

So the significance of Toshiba and Micron coming into the market is that there will be two more vendors, in addition to Samsung, which have total control over the entire SSD manufacturing process.

This, usually, results in innovation and cost-cutting.

So, hopefully, by the end of next year, we’ll be getting SSD laptops with substantially denser and cheaper main storage.

Toshiba intends to kick off, in May, with 32GByte and 128GByte drives. Using MLC (2bit per cell) technology, Toshiba can get a 128GByte SSD into a 1.8 inch form factor. Toshiba's SSD NAND chips will be made on a 56nm process. Read speed is 100MB per second, and write speed is 40MB per second with an operational life of 1m hours.