Dell is jumping into the solid-state disk arena today by offering 1.8" SanDisk UATA 5000 drives on its Latitude D420 ultra-mobile and Latitude D620 ATG semi-rugged notebooks.

SanDisk's 1.8" SSD drive was first announced in early January and features patented TrueFFS flash management technology. Also of importance is the drive's MTBF of 2 million hours. The drive offers sustained read speeds of 62MB/sec and had an average access speed of 0.12 milliseconds. The drive also boosts overall system performance by 23 percent and reduced boot times by 34 percent on the D420 and D620.

"A solid state drive is an excellent storage technology for our mobile users," said Dell CTO Kevin Kettler. "We are committed to leading the industry in delivering these new drives and will offer them across Dell’s next generation of Latitude products."

"This represents an important milestone in the evolution of personal computers with the arrival of solid state flash memory as a durable, efficient alternative to the hard drive, said SanDisk CEO Eli Harari. “For those enterprise road warriors who rely on their notebook PCs, hard drive crashes with attendant loss of critical data will soon be a thing of the past. We’re delighted that Dell has chosen the SanDisk SSD to launch this technology into their line of mobile PCs."

The SanDisk UATA 5000 is currently available as a $450 option on the D420 and a $300 option on the D620 ATG. The drive is also available direct from Dell at a price of $549.