Sandisk says SSD at 64GB for you and me

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 05 June 2007 13:47

Opinion and Analysis

SSD drives, according to SanDisk, have some pretty cool features. They have a lifespan that’s six times longer than mechanical hard drives, delivering a ‘mean time between failure’ or MTBF of 2 million hours. Also, as they have no parts, if you drop the notebook or use it in ‘extreme temperatures’, it should always continue working as normal, whereas a mechanical hard drive can be much more greatly affected depending on the circumstances.

The advantage of no moving parts also delivers high performance, with an SSD claimed to be more than 100 times faster in moving data to and from a flash drive than with your standard notebook hard drive, offering a “sustained read rate of 67 megabytes (MB) per second3 and a random read rate of 7,000 inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) for a 512-byte transfer”.

SanDisk says this means a notebook with a 2.5-inch SSD can book in 30 seconds and access files at an average speed of 0.11 milliseconds, while a notebook using a hard disk will take an average of 48 seconds to boot and an average 17 milliseconds to access files.  

There’s also the issue of power. A regular hard drive uses 1.9 watts of power during active operation, but the 2.5-inch SSD uses 1.0 watts when active and down to 0.4 watts when idle. The 1.8-inch SSD does even better using only 0.5 watts when active and 0.2 watts when idle.
       
All of this means faster operation for a better user experience coupled with the always welcome benefit of longer battery life, although at a price that is still at quite a premium to regular hard drive technology at a smaller capacity.

Manufacturers will get ‘engineering samples’ in the third quarter, while products with the 64GB SanDisk SSD are expected to go on sale by the end of the year, just in time for the Christmas/holiday season.

So, as hard disks race to pack ever more space into traditional hard drives at ever lower price points, the flash manufacturers seek to do the same, with greater demand driving greater production and driving prices down.

SanDisk’s statement ends up telling us to expect good times ahead in terms of unit sales, as they quote Gartner saying that while the ‘global consumption’ of SSDs in consumer and business notebooks will be about 4 million units this year, by 2010 it should grow to 32 million units.

And while all this happens, that USB flash memory stick you’re carrying around is getting bigger too, with 64GB USB memory sticks already on sale, although by 2010 they’ll be as common and likely as inexpensive as 2 and 4Gb USB drives are today. The future sure is looking flashy!