Toshiba ships tiny Blade X-gale solid-state drives

Toshiba has begun shipping new solid-state drives (SSDs) that dramatically cut the space requirements for laptop and tablet computers.

The Blade X-gale series resembles memory strips rather than traditional drive formats, and are between 2.2mm and 3.7mm thick depending on capacity, a reduction of 42 per cent from typical mSATA SSDs, the company said.

The drives are capable of a maximum sequential read speed of 220MB/s and a maximum write speed of 180MB/s, and weigh between 9.8 and 13.2 grams.

"Until recently, storage designers looking for high capacity storage had accommodated the size of hard disk drives into their designs," said Scott Nelson, vice president of the Memory Business Unit at Toshiba America Electronic Components.

"Up to this point, SSD designs also followed the basic design of small form factor hard drives which does not fully leverage the capabilities of high density Nand technology.

"Toshiba's module-based SSDs break with this approach, giving hardware designers greater freedom and flexibility in enabling their product design."

The new drives are available in capacities of 64GB, 128GB and 256GB. Early teardowns show that they are nearly identical to those used in Apple's new MacBook Air models, with similar product codes and serial number strings.