The Company

Storage technology has become one of the most vital components of our ever expanding digital lifestyles. Be it through our music or movies, images of families and friends or having all the information we need to work and play at our fingertips, no other technology has the capability to paint a picture of who we are as individuals and store everything that makes us unique.

Toshiba Europe Storage Products Division (SPD) has remained at the forefront of the storage industry for over 40 years and is the world's only storage supplier that owns design, development, manufacturing, sales and other infrastructure functions spanning the enterprise, mobile and retail environments for both hard disk drive (HDD) and solid state drive (SSD) products. Customers are original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), system integrators and distributors within the EMEA region.

As a leading provider of integrated storage solutions and as the principal inventor of NAND flash storage, Toshiba sets many of today’s industry standards for storage technology. Throughout its history, Toshiba SPD has revolutionized the design and development of small form factor storage devices and its drives can be found inside the world's leading GPS navigation systems, consumer electronics, computers and enterprise solutions. In addition, Toshiba Storage Products Division offers an extensive range of advanced technology drives such as high durability 24/7, extended temperature and SSDs for the industrial, enterprise and automotive sector.

With each new breakthrough, the company has helped product designers realise new and exciting applications that were previously just a figment of someone’s imagination. Inherent to the company’s success has been its sincere commitment to high-quality product engineering and manufacturing, an approach that has established Toshiba products as market leaders worldwide.

Products and Milestones

With the introduction of the world’s first 1.8-inch (4.6cm) drive in 2001, Toshiba not only launched a new class of hard drives, it enabled an entire industry of storage based consumer electronics.

1989 Toshiba introduced the world to Solid State Drives, with the invention of NAND flash storage. 20 years later we welcomed the 512GB SSD to market. Today, Toshiba is a leading supplier of Multi-Level Cell NAND Flash memory and offers a complete line of removable and embedded NAND Flash memory solutions. Moreover, Toshiba is the world's second largest flash memory supplier and owns one of the world's most advanced NAND flash fabrics. The NAND inventor still leads the way in developing non-volatile memory solutions for mobile to industrial environments and beyond.

Toshiba launched the world’s first automotive grade hard drive in 1997. With the automobile widely regarded as the next frontier for future generations of infotainment devices, manufacturers and aftermarket suppliers are turning to Toshiba’s HDD technology to support sophisticated in-car applications such as MP3 playback, digital video, gaming and 3D GPS mapping. Since the company’s first automotive grade HDD, it has exceeded sales of twenty million units, secured over 80 per cent of the global market and has more than 15 of the world’s leading car manufacturers incorporating Toshiba HDDs into their car equipment products.

In January 2004, Toshiba SPD yet again surpassed its competitors with the launch of the world record breaking 0.85-inch (2.2cm) HDD. The miniature drive, the size of a £1/€2, is the first hard drive to deliver multi-gigabyte storage in a sub one-inch form factor and has been specifically designed to enable a new generation of highly portable mobile devices.

Building on this expertise, the company secured yet another industry first in December 2004 with the introduction of the world’s first hard drive to incorporate Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR). Conventional methods for recording data on a magnetic disk, where data is stored in a linear alignment, is fast approaching its limits and squeezing more bits on to a disk will eventually reach a point where over crowding degrades recorded bit quality. By introducing PMR recording across its entire portfolio of HDDs, Toshiba is able to achieve stable higher recording densities and improved storage capacities in forever shrinking form factors. Toshiba is dedicated to increasing areal density even further, through innovative new technologies such as heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) and bit-patterned media (BPM).

In addition, Toshiba SPD is spearheading the introduction of hard disk and solid state disk technologies into key industrial and multimedia markets where high performance drives are to become a pivotal component for next generation electronic systems. In these applications, core components such as HDDs and SSDs are required to operate in extreme environments. To meet this unique market need, Toshiba SPD has introduced a range of industrial grade hard disk drives that feature improved capacities and provide alternative temperature ranges to assist industrial machine manufacturers and after market suppliers. Very similar to the company’s range of automotive-grade HDDs, these drives deliver unsurpassed reliability amid extreme operating conditions withstanding temperature ranges from -30°C to +85°C and at altitudes far greater than their PC and CE counterparts.

Last but not least, Toshiba has entered the Enterprise market segment in 2009 and ventured into the development and distribution of 3.5-inch (8,9cm) and 2.5-inch (6,4cm) enterprise-class HDDs as well as of Solid State Drives for servers and enterprise storage systems.

As a ‘One-Stop Storage Device Supplier,’ Toshiba is perfectly positioned to fulfil the growing demands for a wider range of storage devices from exciting consumer electronics market to quality critical IT markets. For storage technology, the future is bright. A growing number of markets and applications are beginning to see the need for high capacity, high performance storage solutions. Success in this highly competitive market will be down to the company that has the right storage product with the right specification for the specific individual’s or application’s needs – simply for all needs. That company is Toshiba SPD.