World's First PC Integrating 512GB SSD
Toshiba Corporation (TOKYO: 6502), reinforcing its “dynabook SS RX2 series” of notebook PCs offering light weight, slim lines, and long-lasting battery operation, today announced the introduction of the top-of-the-range “dynabook SS RX2/WAJ,” …
Context & Ripple Effects
This announcement is the second half of a play Toshiba started in December 2008, when it launched the industry's first 512GB SSD built on 43nm MLC NAND [[a:1184156]]. Six months later it has found that drive a home in its own hardware: the dynabook SS RX2/WAJ tops the slim, long-battery-life RX2 line and is claimed as the world's first notebook to integrate a 512GB SSD.
The move lands in a laptop-storage arms race Toshiba has been running from the mechanical side too — its August 2007 320GB 2.5-inch hard drive was billed as a laptop best — and against interim designs like MSI's December 2008 hybrid-storage U115 netbook, which paired flash with a spinning disk to cut cost.
First-order effects
- Buyers of the top-of-the-range RX2/WAJ get full-flash storage in Toshiba's lightest, longest-running notebook class, with no hybrid compromise — and Toshiba, as both the NAND maker and the PC maker, captures the value of the drive it announced in December 2008 inside its own product rather than selling components alone.
Second-order effects
- Rival notebook vendors without captive NAND face a choice between buying Toshiba-class drives at component prices or shipping interim architectures like MSI's hybrid disk-plus-flash design, which this full-SSD flagship makes look transitional.
Third-order effects
- If vertically integrated players keep reserving their largest drives for their own machines first, the premium-notebook tier consolidates around companies that control both the memory fab and the chassis — and the 'world's first capacity' headline becomes a recurring marketing cadence, echoing CNET's January 2008 terabyte-notebook teaser [[a:1182466]].
The trend: Notebook storage is migrating from record-capacity spinning disks to NAND flash first at the top of the market, paced by vertically integrated makers like Toshiba who can launch the drive and the laptop that uses it.