Despite the global NAND shortage and the financial troubles Toshiba is experiencing as of late, the company recently announced the new TR200 SSD featuring their latest 64-Layer BiCS TLC 3D NAND.

The new Toshiba TR200 will be available in capacities of 240GB, 480GB, and 960GB. Performance is rated at up to 550MB/s sequential reads and 525MB/s sequential writes. 4K performance is rated at up to 80K/87K IOPS random reads/writes. The drive will feature an endurance of 60-240TBW and a warranty period of 3 years.

The Toshiba TR200 is expected to be showcased at the ChinaJoy show in Shanghai, China from July 27 to July 30, then at GamesCon in Cologne, Germany [...]

Following Toshiba’s announcement of their QLC BiCS 3D NAND last month, Toshiba’s FlashForward NAND development joint venture partner Western Digital recently also announced their own 4-bit per cell QLC 3D NAND product which they refer to as X4.

According to the press release, the WD’s X4 features up to 64-layers of BiCS 3D NAND with a maximum die capacity of up to 768Gb (96GB) per die, or a 50% increase in storage capacity compared to previous generation 512Gb 3-bit per cell X3 NAND.

Currently WD hasn’t revealed any information on plans for future products based on the new NAND. WD will show off the new X4 3D NAND at FMS 2017 in August.

Over the past few months, there hasn’t been a whole lot of good news coming out of Toshiba, but here’s a recent announcement that I think we can all appreciate. In a recent announcement, Toshiba shared news that they’ve developed the industry’s first 4-bit per cell, Quad Level Cell (QLC) BiCS NAND flash memory chips.

The new QLC NAND features a 64-layer cell structure and boasts up to 768Gbit / 96GB per die making it currently the densest dies on the market. By using 16 dies, Toshiba is able to cram as much as 1.5 TB in a single package. This is a 50% increase over a comparable TLC NAND package with the same number of dies.

“From SLC to [...]

Despite Toshiba’s financial woes, their memory division is pressing on, recently announcing that they’ve begun construction on their latest semiconductor fabrication facility, Fab 6 at Yokkaichi, Japan.

Like all the other new fabs that were constructed or retrofitted, Fab 6 will be built to produce Toshiba’s latest BiCS 3D NAND flash. Construction of the new fab will occur in two phases with Phase 1 slated to be complete in the summer of 2018. This will allow Toshiba to re-evaluate and re-asses continued investment in the event NAND flash demand takes a nosedive.

In addition to Fab 6, Toshiba also announced the construction of a new Memory [...]

Western Digital and Toshiba had some great news to announce at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) recently as they revealed that they’ve begun initial production of their BICS3 512Gb, 64-layer TLC 3D NAND at their NAND fabrication facility at Yokkaichi, Japan.

The new 512Gb, 64-layer BICS3 TLC 3D NAND will be the highest density NAND dies announced to date, matching Samsung’s 4th Generation V-NAND which also features 64-layers and 512Gb density. Full production of the new BICS3 NAND is expected to begin in 2H2017.

For the most part, SSD introductions were few and far in-between at CES this year, but SSD maker Plextor made a splash in CES with several new product announcements.

The Plextor M8Se series of SSDs looks to bring the best cost to performance ratio to the high-end consumer market. Powered by Toshiba 15nm TLC along with the Marvell 88SS1093, the M8Se supports the PCIe Gen 3 x4 interface and the latest NVMe standard, allowing the top capacity Plextor M8Se model can reach up to 2.45GB/s in sequential reads and 1GB in sequential writes. 4K random performance is blazing fast too, rated at 210K IOPS reads and 175K [...]

For CES 2017, Toshiba showed off its new BG series SSD in the M.2 1620 BGA and M.2 2230 form factor for ultraportables and mobile devices.

Powered by Toshiba BiCS 3D TLC NAND along with a Toshiba controller, the Toshiba BG series demonstrates the capabilities of Toshiba’s 3D TLC, scaling up to capacities of 512GB in a form factor as small as 16x20mm. In order to achieve this, Toshiba integrated the controller and the NAND into a single package, and as the drive utilizes NVMe’s Host Memory Buffer (HMB) feature which utilizes system DRAM to act as a buffer, DRAM is not required.

The Toshiba BG M.2 1620 SSDs are designed to be integrated into [...]

Looks like Toshiba is ramping up big time with their 3D NAND as they recently announced plans to begin construction on a new state of the art fabrication facility at Yokkaichi Operations in order to expand production of their BiCS 3D NAND technology.

The construction of the new fab is expected to begin February 2017. Like their relatively recently completed Fab 5 facility also in Yokkaichi Operations, Toshiba will construct their new fab in two stages with the first stage expected to be completed by summer 2018. Toshiba will also build a new Memory R&D Center in order to help promote flash memory development by moving all flash memory R&D personnel to the new [...]

Some keen eyes from the guys over at TechInsights recently discovered that the NAND onboard the Apple’s iPhone 7 will come from multiple sources. In a number of teardowns of the new smartphone, the iPhone 7 appears to source NAND from SK Hynix and Toshiba. While this isn’t interesting news as these companies are popular suppliers of NAND, what’s interesting is that certain capacities are using Toshiba’s 48-Layer 3D BiCS NAND, which has never been seen previously on a commercial product.

The Toshiba BiCS 3D NAND in question is the Toshiba THGBX6T1T82LFXF which is being used on the iPhone 7 256GB model. TechInsights is currently conducting a full [...]

Hot on the heels of Toshiba’s recent 64-layer 3rd Generation BiCS 3D NAND announcement, Toshiba also recently announced their upcoming BG series SSDs designed for tablet and ultraportable applications.

Available in capacities of 128GB, 256GB, or 512GB, what’s special about Toshiba’s BG series SSDs is that it come in either a 16mm x 20mm BGA package or in a M.2 2230 module. In order to achieve such capacities in such a small form factor, Toshiba is using an in-house controller solution combined with their BiCS TLC 3D NAND packaged into a single chip. Further reducing size, Toshiba removed the need for onboard DRAM by taking advantage of the NVMe [...]