Home > Storage

Computerworld - SanDisk Corp. unveiled its next-generation solid-state drives (SSDs) at the International CES. One series is aimed at the hot netbook market and the other at laptops. The company's new higher-performance SSD for laptops are priced at less than $250 for a 120GB model and are being positioned as a "drop-in replacement" for hard disk drives to extend the life of existing hardware.

The new G3 notebook and pSSD netbook drives boast sequential read/write speeds of 200MB/sec. and 140MB/sec., respectively.

If those performance claims pan out, the drive would surpass Intel's 10-channel consumer-class X25-M SSD drives for write speeds. The X25-M model has a sequential read and write rate of up to 250MB/sec. and 70MB/sec., respectively.

Samsung also sells a faster SSD that comes in 256GB capacities. That 2.5-in. drive with SATA II interface has up to 220MB/sec. sequential read rates and 200MB/sec. write rates. Samsung is only selling the drive through reseller channels. On Newegg.com, however, a 32GB version of Samsung's 2.5-in., SATA II interface SSD, is selling for $299.

SanDisk's new pSSD-P2 and SanDisk pSSD-S2 SSDs for netbooks are 1.8-in. drives built on SanDisk's 43-nanometer multilevel cell NAND flash memory. They are expected to become available in February in 8GB, 16GB, 32GB and 64GB capacities.

"Netbooks represent the fastest-growing PC segment in 2009 and 2010, yet widespread adoption of SSDs in netbooks has been limited by speed, capacity and cost constraints," Rich Heye, general manager of SSDs at SanDisk, said in a statement.

Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist with market research firm In-Stat Inc., said SanDisk's drives represent a "tipping point" for solid state disk.

"I think we're finally getting to the point where solid state disk is living up to expectations," he said. "As long as you're exceeding the speed of hard drives and you're exceeding the anticipated lifespan, typically three years as far as a corporate warranty goes, then it makes sense."

McGregor said while SSDs are still more expensive than hard disk drives of equal capacity, research from In-Stat shows users are willing to pay a 4% to 5% premium for the advantages SSDs offer, such as faster throughput, lower power consumption and ruggedness.

While SanDisk sees its drives as a "drop-in" replacement for hard disk drives, McGregor said the drives won't be a big seller with consumers and are mainly targeted resellers such as Dell, and most of the drives will be sold in new machines, not as replacements for older drives.

SanDisk did not release pricing for the new netbook SSD drives, saying only that a 32GB modular SSD is priced at parity with 2.5-in. HDDs in reseller quantities.