Toshiba said this week they plans to ship before April 128 GB solid state disk, which will appear first in Toshiba notebooks sold in Japan.

The disc, which has no moving parts, arrives at unusually high capacity at a lower cost than most SSDs through the use of multi-level cell NAND flash technology. Most are single-level cell SSD drives, which store 1 bit of data in each memory cell. MLC drives, on the other hand, store 3 or more bits in each cell. While MLC disks have a transfer speed slower and more energy consumption, they are also much less expensive to achieve.

Nevertheless, SSDs generally cost more than traditional multiple hard disk drives. In justifying the higher cost, manufacturers claim SSDs are faster and more reliable and robust, since there are no moving parts. Recently, however, avian researcher Securities disputed those assertions, saying that customers were dissatisfied returning SSD-basedDell (Dell) notebooks in large numbers. The computer manufacturer said that the bird flu of the estimated rate of return is far too high.

Toshiba believes its latest DSS strikes the right balance between price and performance. “We believe that Toshiba MLC SSDs offer the right combination of cost and performance today to meet the demanding needs storage for laptops and ultra-mobile PC,” Scott Nelson, Vice President of the memory division for Toshiba Toshiba America Electronic Components, said in a statement released Tuesday.

Toshiba, which has not released prices, “says the new disc has a reading speed of 100 MB per second and a write speed of 40 MB per second, making it faster than 5400 rpm and 7200 rpm disk drives. The company asserts that it reaches the high level of performance through the use of a SATA II interface and a new controller MLC.

Accordingly, the last player performs very well in the speed of Windows Vista boot, application loading, current usage, and to facilitate the search for the virus, according to Toshiba.

The new product weighs about three hundredths of a pound and is embedded in a module form factor. Toshiba has also begun mass production of a 64 GB module board. The company plans to begin sampling next month of the same size and SSDs 1.8 inches and 2.5-inch drive enclosures.

While manufacturers plough ahead with notebook targeted SSDs, questions arise as to whether they offer a performance increase significant enough to justify the higher cost. Avi Cohen, managing partner of bird flu securities can be found in the rate of return on notebooks Dell DSS varies from 20% to 30%. A spokesman for Dell, however, said the figures were “totally inaccurate by orders of magnitude.” The computer manufacturer has refused to release specific numbers.

Manufacturers of NAND flash memory, the memory technology used in the SSDs, hoping notebook adoption will give the industry a much-needed financial boost this year. Researcher iSuppli last month reduced its revenue outlook for 2008 the global market for NAND flash memory in single-digit percentage range from its previous estimate of an increase of 27%. Flash manufacturers have taken last year to 13.9 billion.

ISuppli has issued the warning “amid worrying signs of reductions in the order and weak consumer spending.”