Toshiba said it will be ready to begin the mass production of Flash drives for items such as laptops in 2008.

The Japanese firm plans to make solid state drives starting at 32Gb and rising up to 128Gb by May of next year.

Toshiba, which is the second largest producer of Nand Flash chips, said it hoped the 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch drives would create new demand for Flash memory.

Samsung Electronics and SanDisk already manufacture Flash hard drives.

Samsung, the world's largest producer of Flash memory, claimed to have created the first 64Gb Nand Flash card in October this year.

The company said it hoped to use the breakthrough to mass produce 128Gb drives by 2009.

According to figures from analyst firm iSuppli, global sales of Nand Flash jumped by more than 37 per cent in the third quarter of 2007.