San Disk is one of the most important names in the storage solutions' industry, so it's actually no wonder that the company has brought forth its best offerings at this year's CeBIT. Whether we're talking about SSDs, various memory card types, as well as the other goodies on the side.

The first thing that drew our attention was SanDisk's SSD solution (available in 2 form factors), a 64-GB flash-based, metal-encapsulated device which can take just about any shock one might throw at it. The lack of moving parts make SanDisk's SATA 5000 2.5-inch SSD extremely appealing by eliminating the limitations of random seek performance. SanDisk claims that its SSD products are twice as fast as conventional hard-disk drives, as they can achieve a sustained read rate of 67MB/sec and a random read rate of over 7000 inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) for a 512-byte transfer.


A practical test shows that SanDisk's SATA 5000 drive can boot Microsoft Windows Vista Enterprise on a laptop in about 30 seconds, while achieving an average file access rate of 0.11 milliseconds. Its performance is rated by the Windows Experience Index for Microsoft Vista at a performance of 5.6 out of a total 5.9.

The second important device showcased in SanDisk's booth is the Vaulter Disk, a small-zise Flash-based storage solution which can seriously boost the performance of any system (laptops especially). Thus, this relatively tiny flash module can boost the disk transfer speeds on a computer running Windows Vista up to 5.6.

Vaulter's flash-based PCI-Express module operates at the same time with the conventional hard-disk drive, but while the former stores the most frequently accessed files, along with the operating system, the latter would carry files, user-generated content and applications that do not require or benefit from faster seek times. The Vaulter will be shipped at first to OEMs only, in capacities ranging from 8 GB to 16 GB.

Beside these rather hardware-related products, SanDisk has also brought along just about every flash-based storage solution it had available, including here the recently launched VideoHD cards, as well as the already famous Ducatti-branded products (which, for security reasons, were kept under a very tight lock).



Live report by Bogdan Popa and Alex Vochin from CeBIT 2008 Hanover, Germany.