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Toshiba launches SSDs using second generation 19nm NAND

by Mark Tyson on 20 February 2014, 10:15

Tags: Toshiba (TYO:6502)

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Toshiba has announced it is launching its first range of SSDs which will employ its second generation 19nm NAND chips. Drives with capacities of 60GB, 128GB, 256GB and 512GB will be produced in form factors including 2.5-inch (both 9.5mm thick and 7mm thick), mSATA module and M2 (double and single sided(128GB and 256GB only)). The Toshiba HG6 Series SSDs will be available from March onwards.

Toshiba informs us that the HG6 Series won't be targeted at any specific market but will be available and suitable for a wide variety of applications and is thus "optimized for notebook PCs, workstations, thin clients, server boot drives, and read-intensive enterprise applications". This series of drives is touted to offer both high performance and power efficiency. Performance figures for the whole series of drives is quoted as 534MB/s sequential read and 482MB/s sequential write (512GB model).

"With the HG6 series, customers can trust they are using a storage solution with high performance and power efficiency that is ideal for a wide range of applications," said Don Jeanette, senior director of marketing at Toshiba Storage Products Business Unit. "As inventors of NAND technology, we leverage our NAND expertise to optimize the performance and data integrity of this series, and truly give customers the power of choice with a broad selection of capacities and form factors."

Toshiba says the drives are "engineered with enterprise class technology for data integrity," and incorporate error correction tech which protects customers from NAND wear corruption. For security these SSDs also feature encryption compliant with the Trusted Computing Group.

Toshiba only started mass producing NAND using its second generation 19nm process at the end of May last year. The chips have a die size nearly 20 per cent smaller than the previous generation and implement a "unique high speed writing method". As mentioned in the intro, Toshiba's HG6 range will start to ship from March this year, however we shall have to wait until nearer that time for pricing.

HEXUS Forums :: 6 Comments

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Posted by Noxvayl - Thu 20 Feb 2014 10:53
Interesting, I would of thought that their acquisition of OCZ would of meant they would not have their own branded product compete with OCZ SSDs. Perhaps this product was already being geared for launch before the acquisition.

The specs look good, wonder what pricing and availability will be like though? I look forward to reviews.
Posted by M4tt - Thu 20 Feb 2014 12:15
Maybe they'll use Toshiba for business products and OCZ for the consumer lines? I certainly wouldn't trust any OCZ drives to go in my servers!
Posted by crossy - Fri 21 Feb 2014 09:45
I'm curious - the focus seems to be on finer and finer chips these days - with corresponding boosts in performance. For example I recently replaced my old OCZ Vertex 2 boot drive (32nm) with a Samsung EVO (19nm).

Anyway, what about the older chip designs - surely these must be cheaper to make? In which case, why doesn't someone get a load of these, slap ‘em in a case and sell it cheap. I’d love a 1TB EVO, but there's no way I can justify the nearly £500 purchase price. So (arguably) there's a space in the market for a larger-capacity, but slower device.

And, let's be honest, even a “slow” SSD is going to show a clean pair of heels on read speed to a conventional HDD! :)
Posted by Devastater6194 - Sat 22 Feb 2014 14:28
Wouldn't mind a TB msata SSD. All we need now is a PCI-E card to allow us to add multiple cards and raid them using PCI-E rather than sata.
Posted by Funkstar - Sat 22 Feb 2014 15:14
crossy
Anyway, what about the older chip designs - surely these must be cheaper to make? In which case, why doesn't someone get a load of these, slap ‘em in a case and sell it cheap. I’d love a 1TB EVO, but there's no way I can justify the nearly £500 purchase price. So (arguably) there's a space in the market for a larger-capacity, but slower device.
The economies of silicon chips isn't as straight forward as that.

Using the same diameter wafer, which the last I heard was around 300mm, you can get more 19nm chips than 32nm chips. So actually the new chips end up cheaper than the old ones, as well as faster, cooler and more power efficient. To begin with they are probably the same cost per chip, or possibly even more expensive, as they get the manufacturing process ramped up and more reliable (a new process will see a drop in yeild - the number of working chips on a wafer - unit the process is tweeked and corrected). When this happens, we see a drop in prices.

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