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SanDisk's 32GB 2.5" drive to be priced at $350

Back in early January, SanDisk introduced its 32GB 1.8" SSD UATA 5000 for notebook computers. The Flash SSD drive promised sustained reads of 62MB/sec and a 2 million hour MTBF. Today, SanDisk has announced the 2.5" SATA version of the drive.

"The SanDisk 2.5-inch SSD brings the extreme durability, outstanding performance and low power consumption of solid-state flash memory to the entire notebook computer market," said SanDisk VP Amos Marom. "As SanDisk continues to drive innovation in flash memory, the per-gigabyte price of SSD storage will come down and SSD capacity will go up. PC manufacturers and consumers will find it easier and easier to move away from rotating hard disks to the superior experience of SSDs."

The 2.5" version of the drive is slightly faster than its 1.8" sibling. It features sustained reads of 67MB/sec, has an average access speed of 0.11 milliseconds and can boot Windows Vista Enterprise in 30 seconds. This compares to 62MB/sec, 0.12 milliseconds and 35 seconds respectively for the 1.8" drive.

The 32GB 2.5" SSD SATA 5000 is available now for systems builders and is priced at $350 each for volume orders.

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RE: Nice!
By ButterFlyEffect78 on 3/13/2007 3:20:29 PM , Rating: -1
This tech is just the beggining of whats to come. In the near future, we will no longer be needing modern hard drives. Instead it will be replaced by this technology and it will be alot faster then 62mb/sec . Just imagine if they introduce this lil things with ddr or ddr2 , our transfers and writing will be beyong our imagination. Having a ddr/ddr2 interface of this such tech would mean over 3000mb/sec ... now thats what I call a well-worth upgrade..


RE: Nice!
By Wonga on 3/13/2007 3:33:09 PM , Rating: 2
DDR/DDR2 is volatile memory.


RE: Nice!
By SexyK on 3/13/2007 3:33:35 PM , Rating: 2
Except that DDR and DDR2 are volatile which makes them pretty much useless for this type of application. Dont expect these drives to be faster than HDD's anytime soon (in terms of data transfer speed).


RE: Nice!
By PolPot on 3/13/2007 5:15:40 PM , Rating: 4
Not faster than hard drives anytime soon? I submit that 62MB/s sustained over the entire drive IS faster than nearly all current hard drives. Some may have higher rates in the outer edge of the platter, but as an average of outer and inner, I'd bet few can sustain much more than 62 MB/s. Then factor in ultra low seek time and any fragmentation and these look faster.


RE: Nice!
By PolPot on 3/13/2007 5:18:20 PM , Rating: 2
Ok, so the Raptor has 88MB/s max, 55MB/s min according to Storagereview.com. Average is not much higher than 62MB/s. And again, factor in the access times.


RE: Nice!
By regnez on 3/13/2007 5:38:39 PM , Rating: 2
Also factor in noise and power consumption, or lack thereof for the SSD.


RE: Nice!
By hubajube on 3/13/2007 6:12:33 PM , Rating: 2
I wonder how much a 3.5" version would cost?


RE: Nice!
By livelouddiefast on 3/13/2007 9:38:16 PM , Rating: 1
hopefully sometime in the not too distant future everything will drop down to 2.5 inch... save some space after giant video cards


RE: Nice!
By nurbsenvi on 3/13/2007 9:57:44 PM , Rating: 2
Good idea


RE: Nice!
By KernD on 3/13/2007 10:40:12 PM , Rating: 2
What's the point for desktop? your DVD drive is almost 6 inches wide, so the PC isn't gonna really get any smaller, but you would have less capacity in your hard drive, is that what you really want?

You might want to start by using a 3.5 inches removable storage drive, that would make a difference, anyway with high density disc like holographic storage, it's the right time to change the size since you would still gain allot of storage space with a smaller disc.


RE: Nice!
By alienbibin on 3/13/2007 11:01:59 PM , Rating: 2
I totally agree with u. Its time to change the size of the removable media. The 12cm discs are a little large by today's standards. Why not mage it an 8cm disc or still smaller....


RE: Nice!
By pcmatt1024 on 3/14/2007 10:32:04 PM , Rating: 2
why not even a 5.25"? i understand with regular hdds, rotating that large of a disk is a problem. but with these that problem won't exist.


RE: Nice!
By mindless1 on 3/15/2007 3:58:46 AM , Rating: 2
The 62MB/s speed is very suspicious, that it coincides with a realizable throughput over ATA66 technology. This leads one to wonder if either:

A) The flash could've done more if it wasn't ATA66 tech kludged to an SATA output.

B) It's not really 62MB/s, it would be akind to saying USB2 has 480Mbit/s sustained *on paper*.

The real question is not one of whether it's 62MB/s though, we can't really expect that to matter much because to realize much difference isolated from other system bottlenecks it would depend on very large files with limited processing, a target application where 32GB is still a bit limiting and in other apps, that $300 price premium over a mechnical 32+GB HDD buys a lot of DDR2/3 memory which for caching purposes on smaller files, still destroys it performancewise. Remember that the best performance from any hard drive is to not use it, no matter solid-state or mechanical it's still the bottleneck to many tasks if any file is read more than once per system power cycle.


RE: Nice!
By treesloth on 3/13/2007 5:55:30 PM , Rating: 2
Idunno... I wouldn't say useless...

http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/

Their Hyperdrive system is pretty awesome and sexy as hell. Of course, it's also well outside most folk's price range, but a guy can dream, right?


RE: Nice!
By wien on 3/13/2007 3:43:28 PM , Rating: 1
DDR drives? I certainly won't buy a drive based on volatile memory, and I highly doubt anyone will try to create one for the mass market. Not as a serious alternative to hard-drives at least.


RE: Nice!
By GaryJohnson on 3/13/2007 4:43:58 PM , Rating: 2
RE: Nice!
By cheetah2k on 3/13/2007 8:48:43 PM , Rating: 2
I have a pair of I-Rams in RAID 0 (4Gb + 4Gb) and i boot XP in under 4 seconds.

Try and beat that with any current hard drives out there.


RE: Nice!
By wien on 3/14/2007 10:41:04 AM , Rating: 2
I know they exist, which was why I qualified my statement with "for the mass market". Those i-Ram drives are anything but.


RE: Nice!
By livelouddiefast on 3/13/2007 9:40:02 PM , Rating: 1
blah blah... ram is volatile...

what if we got to a point where hard drives were so fast ram was completely unnecessary? This is possible, think, though correct me if i'm wrong


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