Solid state hard drives finally have the capacity to be practical, with 64GB enough to satisfy the average notebook users. The use of solid state drives can extend a notebook's battery life whilst improving performance and reducing noise.

SanDisk claims the drives offer 2 million hours mean time between failures (MTBF), approximately six times more than notebook hard disks. With no moving parts, SanDisk solid state drives are also much less likely to fail when a notebook computer is dropped or exposed to extreme temperatures.

With no moving parts, the flash-based solid state drive starts working almost immediately to achieve far better access speeds than a conventional hard disk drive. According to SanDisk, in notebook computers, data moves to and from an solid state drive more than 100 times faster than data moving to and from a hard disk. SanDisk solid state drives offer a sustained read rate of 67 megabytes (MB) per second and a random read rate of 7,000 inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) for a 512-byte transfer. As a result, notebooks equipped with a 2.5-inch SanDisk solid state drive can boot Microsoft Windows Vista Enterprise in as little as 30 seconds and access files at an average speed of 0.11 milliseconds. A notebook using a hard disk requires an average 48 seconds to boot and an average 17 milliseconds to access files.

Compared to a typical hard disk drive, which consumes 1.9 watts during active operation, SanDisk solid state drives consume 1.0 watt (0.5 watts for 1.8") while active and as little as 0.4 watts (0.2 watts for 1.8") while idle.

Gartner projects global consumption of solid state drives in consumer and business notebooks to leap from about 4 million units in 2007 to 32 million units in 2010.

SanDisk solid state drives products are available now to manufacturers. The company plans to offer 64GB engineering samples in the third quarter, with mass production planned to commence prior to the end of the year.

SanDisk's new 64GB solid state drive will be on display in Hall 1 at Computex - in Booths C1000, 1002 and C1004 along with other SanDisk OEM embedded flash storage products such as iNAND and mDOC H3.{moscomment}