Toshiba to enter SSD market this year

[Cooper]

Confirming some fresh rumors, the buyer of Fujitsu's hard drive business, Toshiba, has revealed that it will start to manufacture solid state drives in the Philippines to complement the Japanese SSD production. Toshiba's intention comes from the need to increase its SSD output while maintaining production costs to relatively low levels, and thus take a bigger piece of the growing flash storage market.

Work in the Philippines plant is expected to kick off in Q2 and it will see to the making of SSDs with capacities from 64 to 512GB that feature 43nm NAND flash memory chips. With the added capacity, Toshiba hopes to control some 30% of the SSD market by the fiscal year ending March 2011.

Source (http://www.tcmagazine.com/comments.php?shownews=25144&catid=6)

[acidpython]

I don't like Fujitsu hard drives i've had a lot of them fail prematurely on me over the years. 30% is high hopes but would certainly be good to have some competition to drive prices down.

[Firestrider]

There is a ton of competition in the SSD market right now... pretty much every DRAM manufacturer plus Intel has one.

Bad for Seagate and Western Digital if they don't invest and make one.

[Helmore]

Isn't the thread title a little misleading? I mean, Toshiba has already been in the SSD market for a little while now, just check their own press releases like this one:
http://www.toshiba.com/taec/news/press_releases/2007/memy_07_500.jsp
They have been mass producing SSDs since Q1 of 2008.

[gillll]

donno... toshiba has become regular oem like non brands where their product quality isn't that much

i see that on their lcd line and dvd players.

[iddqd]

mediocre laptops too. Actually, their laptops were never above average. (so I can't say the quality dropped)

[Miwo]

these are probably going to be meant for mainstream notebooks and netbooks, thats where the money is

setting my expectations low, i dont expect an x25 competitor here

[Helmore]

As low as the specs indicate over here:
http://www.toshiba.com/taec/Catalog/Family.do?familyid=7&subfamilyid=900314
240 MB/s reads and 200 MB/s writes.