Compatible with the pervasive IDE disk technology, the flash drives range in density from 16 Mbytes to 2 Gbytes. Toshiba is aiming the products at industrial applications, arguing that solid-state memory is inherently more durable to shock and vibration, and also more resistant to temperature, humidity, dust and magnetism than hard-disk drives.

"We are trying to cultivate new applications for NAND flash," a Toshiba spokesman said. "The current capacity of HDDs is at least 10 Gbytes or beyond, but there are many applications requiring 1-Gbyte or 2-Gbyte capacity, including ATM, factory automated machines and so on."

For such applications, "current hard drives are not the ideal solution from a view of memory capacity and strength," the spokesman said.

Toshiba's flash drives run on 5 volts, come equipped with an IDE PIO mode 4 and are compatible with the ATA command set. They support 3.2-Mbyte/second write speeds and 6.5-Mbyte/second read speeds.

Toshiba said it anticipates sustained growth in demand for NAND flash drive, estimating market demand at $1.3 billion in 2003 growing to $2.5 billion in 2005.

The flash chip market is one of the most distressed in the slumping semiconductor industry, and could decrease this year to half of last year's size, according to International Data Corp. Sales of NAND flash hit $1.37 billion last year, said flash analyst Michito Kimura of IDC Tokyo. Prices for 64-Mbits of flash have dropped by more than half since the fourth quarter of last year, Kimura said.

Toshiba's move could be an effort to find a fledgling market for its flash chips. The company took strong steps into certain flash segments in 2000, including a 33 percent share of the digital still camera and MP3 player end markets. After cutting production about 20 percent over the last two quarters, the company is desperate to find new markets for NAND flash, Kimura said.