Lately there has been somewhat of bad press surrounding solid state drives. We heard about Dell's high return rates for SSD-based laptops, and more recently Seagate CEO's put down. Those who criticize the technology believe the lack of performance and limited capacity don't justify the high prices the drives currently sell for. Now, Toshiba is trying to balance out the formula by offering a new 128GB solid state drive with MLC technology.
While regular solid state drives store 1 bit of information per memory cell, MLC drives can store 3 or more bits per cell. This translates into drives that are comparatively slower but are much cheaper to produce. The new drives will offer a write speed of 40MB per second and a read speed of 100MB/s. Nothing to be impressed about, but hopefully Toshiba will dazzle us with its price, which they preferred not to reveal just yet. Drives are already being mass produced and are expected to ship by April, hopefully bringing a new face to SSD pricing.