SanDisk's 32Gb 2.5-inch hard drive a sign of the times

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 14 March 2007 20:49

Your IT - Entertainment

Amos Marom, the VP and general manager of the Computing Systems division at SanDisk is clearly excited and proud about the new drive. He says that “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. 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.”

SanDisk say that their drive delivers a whopping 2 million hours mean time between failures or MTBF, which SanDisk says is around six times the lifespan of a traditional hard drive. This is because there are no moving parts, but also because flash drives are far more impervious to damage from being dropped onto a hard surface, or exposed to extreme temperatures, no doubt making manufacturers of ‘rugged’ laptop and notebook computers very happy.

What about the need for speed? Well, SanDisk says to moving data to and from an SSD happens more than 100 times faster than data moving to and from a hard disk. Wow! The tech specs are 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.”

SanDisk claim that this will allow Vista to boot in as little as 30 seconds5 and access files at an average speed of 0.11 milliseconds. SanDisk says that a regular notebook hard disk requires an average 48 seconds to boot and an average 17 milliseconds to access files.

There’s also the need for power efficient in our energy challenged world. SanDisk say that SSDs have minimal power requirements, “with savings rated at over 50 percent compared with a hard disk drive -- 0.9 watts during active operation versus 1.9 watts”. Of course, SanDisk reminds us that ‘road warriors’ will find this particularly useful, as they can compute for longer without needing to find a power point to recharge their batteries.

And then there’s the aspect of cool and quiet. There are no motors or moving parts of any kind in an SSD, so not only is less heat generated, but the SSDs are completely silent – something that will not only interest notebook users, but those who want a completely silent media PC next to their TVs.

For more information on SanDisk’s SSDs please visit www.sandisk.com/ssd.