Toshiba announced on Thursday a new addition to its series of SSDs built with its latest 43-nanometer manufacturing process - the company's first 2.5-inch 512GB SSD. The new drive will make its public debut at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, with other SSD drives - 64, 128, and 256GB drives - available in either 1.8-inch or 2.5-inch enclosures.

Though Toshiba did not disclose the pricing, it said samples of the new products will be available in the first quarter of next year, and mass production is scheduled for the second quarter.

The second-generation SSDs feature multilevel cell controllers that achieve read speeds of 240 MBps, and write speeds of 200 MBps, and contain AES data encryption. Other specs include a serial ATA-2 interface, and a mean time between failures of 1 million hours. The weight of the drives is model-specific - varying from a half-ounce to about 2 ounces.

In a statement, MKiyoshi Kobayashi, vice president of Toshiba Corp's semiconductor company, said: "The solid state drive market is evolving rapidly. This new 43nm SSD family balances value/performance characteristics for its targeted consumer applications, through use of MLC NAND and advanced controller architecture."

Along with being more durable in comparison to traditional hard-disk drives, SSDs are also typically lighter, consume less power, and deliver higher performance. However, the technology costs much more per gigabyte than HDDs. As a result, SSDs are used in select applications, such as mini-laptops, where less weight and more durability in a storage device are important.