SSD for the masses

Mar 14, 2007 09:10 GMT  ·  By

As one of the biggest flash memory manufacturers in the world, Sandisk Corporation has announced the introduction of a new product next to the many other flash products they produced. This would be a new 32GB SSD with a Serial ATA interface especially designed for usage on notebooks. It features a 2.5-inch form factor, so that it would fit nicely in existing notebooks, being a very suitable replacement for a hard drive.

Sandisk points out some of the main benefits of this SSD, the first one being its reliability, able to withstand some 2.000.000 hours MTBF, almost six times more reliable than usual 2.5-inch hard drives, because it has no moving parts.

In performance, Sandisk boasts the SSD as being 100 times faster than a hard drive when it comes to moving data to and from the drive. This is achieved also due to its sustained 67MB/s read rate, with a random read rate of 7.000 inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) for a 512 byte transfer.

The company has previously released a 1.8inch version of SSD, this one being more suitable for mass production due to the form factor compatibility to the one required by notebook manufacturers. The price tag was originally specified to be somewhere around 600$, but now it has come down to 350$ a piece, only "for large volume orders".

This doesn't come as a surprise on the market, but more as a normal process. A team of Korean scientists has just developed a flash memory unit cell which is only 8nm big; make a NAND flash memory module out of it and you get the possibility of storing 1250 DVDs on a single memory card.