Sandisk launches flash hard drive replacement for laptops

Sandisk has unveiled a new 32GB, 1.8-inch solid state drive (SSD), touted as a replacement for the standard mechanical hard disk drive.

The disks are initially aimed at enterprise customers but the company hopes that this will then spread to consumer laptops as prices get cheaper.

It said the declining cost of NAND flash memory has made SSD "a viable and economically attractive alternative to existing technologies in a wider variety of applications, including mobile PCs aimed at enterprise and consumer users."

Eli Harari, SanDisk CEO said that once his company began shipping the 32GB SSD for notebook PCs, "we expect to see its increasing adoption in the coming years as we continue to reduce the cost of flash memory."

"When these SSD devices become more affordable, we expect that their superior features over rotating disk drives will create a new consumer category for our retail sales channels worldwide," said Harari. He said the using the flash disk instead oa normal hard drive in a laptop could increase the end-user price by around £300 in the first half of 2007.

The company claimed that the new SSD could achieve a sustained read rate of 62 MBps and a random read rate of 7,000 inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) for a 512-byte transfer - more than 100 times faster than most hard disk drives, it said. The drive also boasts a two million hours mean time between failures (MTBF).

It also claimed that a laptop using the flash disk could boot up Windows Vista in 35 seconds with 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.

Analysts said that 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 and this is leading to lower prices for memory using the technology.

"There are dramatically higher bit capacities and lower prices, so the technology is now well positioned to be the foundation for new generations of potentially disruptive solid state drives. Enterprise mobile PC users will find the high performance and low power consumption especially attractive," said Robert Gray, analyst at IDC.

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