SanDisk has now, as expected, launched its first SSD unit for the PC market and the first Solid State Drive drive looks to be a direct competitor to Samsung’s already launched unit. Just as the competition, SanDisk’s SSD unit has a storage capacity at 32GB and separating it from regular harddrives it’s NAND flash memory circuits which store the data. The format of the harddrive is 1.8″ and is suppose to be used instead of mechanical harddrives of the same format on the laptop/notebook market. The SSD technology have several advantages over today’s mechanical harddrives and SanDisk emphasize the low power consumption and lightning-fast access times.
“The SanDisk SSD announced today achieves a sustained read rate of 62 megabytes (MB)(ii) per second and a random read rate of 7,000 inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) for a 512-byte transfer(iii) – more than 100 times faster than most hard disk drives. Taking advantage of this performance, a laptop PC equipped with SanDisk SSD can boot Microsoft Windows® Vista(TM) Enterprise in as little as 35 seconds(iv). It also can achieve an average file access rate of 0.12 milliseconds, compared with 55 seconds and 19 milliseconds, respectively, for a laptop PC with a hard disk drive(v).”
We’re looking forward to seeing some more practical tests with SanDisk’s first SSD unit and especially in comparison with Samsung’s equivalent. SanDisk claims that laptops equipped with a 32GB SSD units, instead of a mechanical harddrive, will get a price addition of 600 USD, which means that the new drive should cost about 700 USD. The question is just if/when this SSD unit will become available on the retail market, it’s not that far-fetched that we may very well have to wait for the next generation of SSD units to arrive before we will be able to use them with out stationary computers.
