SanDisk Corporation has introduced a 32-gigabyte (GB), 1.8-inch solid state drive (SSD) as a replacement for standard mechanical hard disk drive.
Aimed at enterprise and consumers, SanDisk SSD offers durability to keep mobile PCs working in tough conditions. Previously, the military, aerospace and telecom industries used flash based drives that demand performance and reliability.
The main advantage is its achieving a read rate of 62 megabytes (MB) per second and a random of 7,000 inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) for a 512-byte transfer - more than 100 times faster than most hard disk drives.
An extremely low power consumption rate in comparison to a hard disk drive: 0.4 watt during active operation versus 1.0 watt is another advantage.
"There has been a huge increase in demand for NAND flash memory over the past few years from consumer devices such as digital cameras, MP3 players and mobile phones," said Robert Gray, analyst, IDC.
The declining cost of NAND flash memory has made SSD a viable and economically attractive alternative.
"This is an important milestone for SanDisk to create markets for flash storage solutions for consumers in the personal computing space," said Eli Harari, SanDisk CEO.
"The inclusion of the SanDisk 32GB SSD in a notebook PC can increase end-user price by around $600 in the first half of 2007," he added.
"Enterprise mobile PC users will find the high performance and low power consumption especially attractive," concluded Gray.
SanDisk SSD 1.8-inch 32GB solid state drive is currently available for original equipment manufacturers.
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