Solid state drives (SSD) are slowly marching toward the consumer space by gradually stepping up to bat against their traditional counterparts. Capacities and read/write times are still a little low, while prices are still quite high. Toshiba's president, however, laid out a game plan for the industry that puts SSD drives in one quarter of notebooks within three years.

Speaking at a recent seminar hosted by IDEMA Japan, Toshiba's Shozo Saito discussed the future of NAND flash memory and what it means for SSD drives. Considering that the advantages of these drives (no moving parts, compact design) make them a good fit for notebook PCs, Saito wants to target them exclusively to notebooks, leaving the more capacious needs of desktop PCs to HDDs. He expects that Toshiba will be offering a 512GB SSD by 2011 This focus on SSDs for notebooks is a result of Toshiba's findings that demand for this configuration will expand by 313 percent every year from 2008 to 2011.

To help bring manufacturing costs for NAND memory down and get these drives into more consumers' price ranges, Toshiba is working to increase its multi-level cell capacities. In March, the company began producing 3-bit-per-cell drives and is now working on a 4-bit-per-cell technology to maximize the use of silicon materials. Saito stated that this should help lower Toshiba's NAND manufacturing costs by 40-50 percent each year.

Already, with apparently strong success of products like Apple's MacBook Air and other notebook lines with SSDs, prices seem to be coming down to earth. When the MacBook Air was introduced earlier this year, Apple charged $999 to upgrade to a 64GB SSD drive, while Dell reportedly charged nearly $1,700. Now the same drive costs anywhere from $550-$800 from Dell, depending on the notebook model. We also saw reports of a 128GB costing $4,600 last September; that same drive can now be had for about $3,400.

Current multi-level-cell SSDs support up to 10,000 rewrites, and Saito believes that more efficient caching could keep the number of rewrites needed during a notebooks typical five-year life span well below that number. Moving towards 2011, Saito also stated that the price ratio between SSDs and HDDs will likely dissipate as well, as long as NAND manufacturing costs keep reducing by his 50 percent per year goal.

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