OREANDA-NEWS. January 9, 2013. Toshiba Corporation (TOKYO: 6502) is pleased to announce that its MQ01ABDH hybrid drive series was awarded the Storage Visions™ Visionary Award in the Mobile Consumer Storage product category at the 12th annual Storage Visions Conference, held in Las Vegas, U.S.A. from January 6th to 7th . Storage Visions is an annual storage products technical event covering hard disk drives (HDD) and solid state drives (SSD), and the award recognizes excellence in embedded storage solutions in mobile consumer devices.

Today's PCs must meet increasingly strong demands for storage capacities that can handle multiple HD videos and other data-rich sources, and deliver read/write speeds that support excellent performance. Toshiba's MQ01ABDH hybrid drive integrates NAND flash memory with a hard drive to make full use of the large capacity of the HDD and the fast data access speeds of the NAND. It also features self-learning caching algorithms that optimize performance by learning the system user's data access patterns. The Visionary Award was presented in recognition of Toshiba's innovative approach and the advanced technologies the company brought to the hybrid drive.

Shipments of the MQ01ABDH series started in autumn 2012 for OEM customers and notebook PCs with the drive are already in the market. Toshiba expects hybrid drives to account for about half of all 2.5-inch storage products shipped for the notebook PC market in fiscal year 2015. Toshiba is now developing next generation hybrid drives and will continue to promote advances in its storage products business, pursuing development of solutions offering higher capacities and even better levels of performance.