Toshiba took the wraps off new, low-power enterprise class solid-state drives (SSDs) that it plans to bring to market during the first half of next year. Its MKx001GRZB series of 2.5-inch drives — which will be available in 100 GB, 200 GB and 400 GB capacities — will sport the company’s 32nm SLC NAND flash chips and 6Gb/sec SAS interfaces.

According to the company, these add up to some pretty impressive performance and energy efficiency gains:

The drives deliver performance that outpaces competing enterprise-class SSDs, with random sustained 90,000 read and 17,000 write IOPS and sequential sustained 510MB/sec read and 230MB/sec write throughput. Combined with a low power requirement of only 6.5 Watts at operation, the Toshiba SSD family also delivers an industry-leading power efficiency rating of 13,800 IOPS/Watt.

Naturally, this kind of performance won’t come cheap. And while it’s still too early to talk pricing, the company enlisted Gartner research director Joseph Unsworth to shed some light on SSD’s cost effectiveness.

“The performance and energy benefits of SSDs can outweigh the cost difference compared to HDDs, and many organizations will want to use solid state technology for applications that require extremely fast data access,” he states. Unsworth also adds that the tipping point for enterprise SSDs is a couple of years away — 2013 in fact — which sheds light into why data storage providers are busy fleshing out their flash storage portfolios. It’s a safe bet as businesses strive for faster, greener IT operations. In recent months, Kingston, OCZ, Pliant Technologies and Hitachi and Intel have been hard at work readying new flash storage solutions for data centers.