An announcement yesterday by Toshiba revealed the release of a new flash storage device, the world’s first 2.5-inch 512GB solid-state drive. Joining the company’s NAND-flash-based solid state drives, this latest device promises users not just large storage but enhanced performance too.

Using Toshiba’s 43 nanometer assembly process and dense multi-level cell storage, the SSD will now allow laptop users to take complete advantage of large hard drive. It boasts of maximum read and write speeds of 240MB per second and 200MB per second respectively. The drive also sports a 3Gbps SATA-II connection.

With an AES data encryption that should prevent unauthorized data access, the SSD claims to have high level performance and endurance that is ideal for gaming and home entertainment systems along with notebooks.

In addition to this Toshiba will also launch smaller 1.8-inch drives with capacities of 64GB, 128GB and 256GB. While the price of the 2.5” 512 GB SSD is a mystery, the drives should enter the test phase by winter 2009 and mass production for shipping should start sometime around spring 2009.