Stefan Mileschin

Toshiba announced their THNSNF SSD series today. The announcement was long overdue as currently Toshiba's fastest SATA offering is the HG3 series, which was released in January 2010. The name of the new series is certainly not the most user friendly but it should be kept in mind that so far Toshiba has only sold their SSDs to OEMs, so the naming is not that important.

THNSNF will finally bring SATA 6Gb/s support to Toshiba SSDs, and the series is based on Toshiba's own controller. Toshiba has definitely taken their time developing this controller considering we saw the first SATA 6Gb/s SSDs (Crucial's RealSSD C300) in early-2010—over two years ago—and the first such SSDs hit retail (albeit with some growing pains) in February 2010. The actual model number of the controller is still unknown, but it's possible that it's the same controller (TC58NC5HJGSB-01) that surfaced in IO-Data's SSDs a couple of months ago. On the other hand, Toshiba is known for quality and reliability with their SSDs, so it's not that surprising that it took this long for them to test and validate a SATA 6Gb/s contoller—it can easily take over a year of validation to make sure everything works properly.

On top of the brand new controller, Toshiba is also using their own state of the art 19nm Toggle-Mode 2.0 MLC NAND. Some of Toshiba's 24nm NAND used Toggle-Mode 2.0 interface as well so it's not brand new, but at 400MB/s it's faster than what ONFi can provide at this point. Toshiba is in fact the first SSD company to announce SSDs based on sub-20nm NAND, though we should start seeing 64Gb 20nm IMFT NAND soon unless Intel and Micron have issues with the new process node. Here's the overview of the new Toshiba SSDs.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5912/t...m-nand-is-here