Thursday, January 04, 2007

SanDisk 32GB Solid-State Disk Drive

Another step in a march I'm really going to enjoy:
SanDisk today entered the SSD fray with a 32GB drive of its own. The 1.8" SanDisk SSD Ultra ATA 5000 drive uses patented TrueFFS flash management technology and has a 2 million hour MTBF. The drive has no moving parts, so it is completely silent and weighs less than traditional 1.8" mobile hard drives.

...When it comes to performance, the SanDisk SSD Ultra ATA 5000 offers sustained reads of 62MB/sec and can complete random reads at 7300 IOPS (512-byte file size). The drive can boot Windows Vista Enterprise on a notebook in 35 seconds and has an average access time of 0.12 ms.

...SanDisk’s new SSD Ultra ATA 5000 drive is currently available to OEMs and is expected to add $600 to the price of a new notebook computer in the first half of 2007. That figure is expected to drop as the year progresses.

That was from Daily Tech, by the way.

This is primarily expected to be used as a notebook drive, but it won't be long before 64GB solid state drives are available for under $500--two more years, or maybe even sooner. At that capacity, they'll be entirely usable as a drive in a desktop--even the 32GB at this point could be used as a second drive.

Remember the days when if you wanted a "power" system, you had to put up with all kinds of noise? No more. If you wanted to, you could put together an extremely high-end system that was almost silent. The graphics card would be the only exception, and even that noise would be manageable with an after-market cooler.

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