SanDisk has unveiled a 32GB 2.5" Serial ATA Solid State Disk targeted at the portable computer market, including laptop and tablet PCs. This comes just two months after its introduction of 1.8" SSD discs targeted at sub-notebooks. Its 32GB SSD can be used as a direct replacement for standard 2.5" SATA hard disks, as used in most recent laptop models without any special software or firmware update requirements. It is extremely durable and gives much lower power consumption, higher performance than standard hard disks for portable computers and a long life of 2 million hours MTBF
According to SanDisk, its SSDs feature a sustained transfer rate of 67MB/s and a random access rate of 7,000 I/O operations per second based on 512 byte transfers. When used with Windows Vista Enterprise, boot time is just 30 seconds compared with 48 seconds for a hard disk. The average file access time is just 0.11 milliseconds compared with a 17 millisecond access time on traditional hard disks.
Besides faster boot-up and application loading time, one other advantage is that disk fragmentation would an insignificant effect on file access times. Even if an SSD becomes severely fragmented where files may be split up in 1,000's of fragments per file, it would still take significantly less time to defrag the SSD than a similarly fragmented hard disk.
According to the press release, these disks are priced at $350 for system builders for volume orders. Further information can be read in the SanDisk press release here.
