SanDisk Releases 32 GB Solid State 2.5-Inch Hard Drive

A couple of months ago SanDisk introduced a 1.8-inch flash based hard drive for notebook computers. It has now announced a more mainstream 2.5-inch 32 GB capacity Solid State Drive (SSD) that could be dropped into any UMPC or micro-notebook and work right out of the gate.

The 2.5-inch SanDisk SSD is only going to be available directly to PC manufacturers initially, and it will be offered as a drop in replacement for replacing existing hard drives.

The cost to PC manufacturers will be about $350 per drive when purchased in bulk.

The benefits of a Solid State Disk:

• Lower power consumption than regular mechanical hard drive, SanDisk claims its drive is 50% more efficient than a regular hard drive as it uses 0.9 watts compared to the 1.9 watts of many regular hard drives.
• Better reliability, according to SanDisk this drive is approximately six times more reliable than a regular hard drive. SanDisk claims its SSDs deliver 2 million hours mean time between failures (MTBF).
• Better performance, data moves to and from the SSD drive almost 100 times faster than a regular hard disk that use a mechanical head for reading and writing data.
  • Read rate of 67 MB/s
  • Random read rate of 7,000 inputs/outputs per second for a 512-byte transfer
  • Windows Vista boots in about 30 seconds and can access files at an average speed of 0.11 ms, while a regular hard drive takes 48 seconds to boot Vista and 17 milliseconds to access a file.
• Cooler and quieter running as there is no motor, bearings, or moving head mechanism.
• More secure with data as a drop situation is less risky for losing data than the same situation with a regular mechanical hard drive.

SanDisk's 32 GB, 2.5-inch SSD is available to computer manufacturers now. More information on it can be found on SanDisk's web site.

Intel Entering the Market

In a related story, Intel has announced that it's going to enter the hard drive market with its own line of solid state offerings.

It's first SSD, the Z-U130, will come in 1 GB, 2 GB, 4 GB and 8 GB varieties, and will have read times of 28 MB per second and write speeds of 20 MB per second. All of this will be connected using a standard USB 2.0/1.1 interface.

Intel says the drive is expected to offer a MTBF of five million hours.

No word at this time on pricing, but according to Intel, the 1 GB and 2 GB drives are already in production and the 4GB model is set to follow in April. The 8 GB version won't be out until the end of this year.

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Tiffany Boggs contributed to this article.