Toshiba 15nm TLC SG5 SSD has up to 1TB capacity and either 2.5 inch or M.2 form factor

If your desktop or laptop doesn't have an SSD, you are missing out on something wonderful. If you think your mechanical hard disk drive is "good enough", please know that a solid state upgrade can reduce noise, increase battery life, and most importantly, dramatically improve performance. Even if you are adverse to spending money, there are plenty of affordable drives nowadays.

Today, Toshiba announces a new series of SSD with the 'SG5' designation. These solid state drives have capacities up to 1TB and feature 15nm fabricated TLC nand chips. To meet the needs of most consumers, the drives will come in either 2.5 inch or M.2 form factors. Unfortunately, the drives -- including the M.2 variant -- utilize the SATA interface, so speeds will not be mind-blowing like a PCIe SSD.

"The SG5 Series will embed 15nm TLC NAND flash memory, achieving high storage capacities while maintaining a small form factor and decreasing costs for consumers. The SG5 Series is Toshiba's first client SATA SSD to support 1,024GB capacity in an M.2 form factor. This family of drives is designed for commercial notebook and desktop PCs, consumer upgrades and higher end notebook applications. With this lower cost, high performance drive, Toshiba is committed to accelerating the adoption of SSDs in client PCs", says Toshiba.

Cameron Brett, director of SSD product marketing at Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc explains, "we understand our customers' needs for performance are constantly changing. The SG5 Series gives our customers the flexibility of system configuration with a selection of various capacities and form factors. As the inventor of NAND flash technology, we leverage our NAND expertise to introduce state-of-the-art TLC NAND to optimize SSD performance in a small form factor, while giving our customers the ability to strengthen their data integrity with data protection features like Toshiba's proprietary QSBC and wipe technologies".

We are at the point where most SATA-based solid state drives are pretty much at the same speeds, so the differentiation is in reliability. Toshiba's QSBC technology gives these drives an edge, as it can help to prevent data corruption.

Unfortunately, both pricing and availability are unknown at this time. Cost per gigabyte is an extremely important factor in decision-making; if these are competitively priced, Toshiba's fancy QSBC tech may sway consumers. Hopefully the company will reveal more details soon.