I nearly missed this last week, but Toshiba announced plans to build a 512GB 2.5 inch SSD, with sequential read and write speeds at a blazing 200 MB/s.

Mass production will begin in the second quarter of 2009.

According to the company press release:

Toshiba and many market analysts expect SSDs to begin to gain significant traction in the market in 2009, growing to approximately 10% of the notebook market by 2010, and 25% of the notebook market by 2012. Toshiba expects the value/performance of its MLC NAND-based SSD line-up to help speed the acceptance of solid state storage.

I imagine that this, combined with the earlier announced partnership between Intel and Hitachi to build SSDs will heat up the SSD market for the next few years.

Even though next year isn’t likely to be a strong year for electronics sales, the market may pick back up by the end of 2009 through the start of 2010.

[Toshiba Press Release c/o Tom’s Hardware News]

Filed under: Hardware