Toshiba America Electronic Components Inc. (TAEC) has expanded its line of NAND-based SSDs into the enterprise storage market with the company's first single-level cell (SLC) NAND-based SSDs.

The drives feature the serial attached SCSI (SAS) interface. Toshiba's SSD lineup will offer random input/output operations per second (IOPS) up to 25,000/20,000 for a 4-Kbyte data block size read/write, and storage capacities of up to 100-gigabyte (GB).

The drives will be available in 2.5-inch small form factor and offer many enterprise features, such as dual ported SAS redundancy and non-volatile cache. Samples of the new drives will be available in late first quarter of 2009, with mass production in the second quarter.

''SLC NAND solid state drives in the enterprise space offer a significant value proposition, achieving lower $/IOPS, which until now was not economically possible,'' said Scott Nelson, vice president memory for TAEC (Irvine, Calif.), in a statement. ''Our enterprise-class SSDs are targeted for use in business critical applications that require storage performance only available from solid state drives, such as Tier 0 virtual memory in storage arrays.''