SanDisk Launches 32 GB Solid-State Drive
March 13, 2007 | by Geoff Duncan
If the thought of spinning hard drive platters in your notebook makes you queasy, SanDisk is offering a 2.5-inch flash hard drive drop-in replacement.
SanDisk has announced a new entry in its line-up of flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs), the SSD SATA 5000, a 32 GB 2.5-inch hard drive designed to function as a drop-in replacement for traditional 2.5-inch hard drives in notebooks and other computer systems. "The SanDisk 2.5-inch SSD brings the extreme durability, outstanding performance and low power consumption of solid-state flash memory to the entire notebook computer market," said Amos Marom, VP and general manager of SanDisk's Computing Systems division, in a release. "As SanDisk continues to drive innovation in flash memory, the per-gigabyte price of SSD storage will come down and SSD capacity will go up. PC manufacturers and consumers will find it easier and easier to move away from rotating hard disks to the superior experience of SSDs." In January, SanDisk introduced a 32 GB 1.8-inch SSD hard drive intended for ultraportable systems, media players, and hand-held devices. The idea behind the 2.5-inch model is to offer computer manufacturers an easy drop-in replacement for traditional hard drives. Why would someone go with a comparatively small-capacity 32 GB flash drive rather than a traditional hard disk, commonly available at capacities of 120 GB today? The main reasons are performance and reliability. The SanDisk SSDs can push 67 MB/sec in sustained reads, and have much faster random read speeds than traditional hard drives. According to SanDisk, an SSD drive can boot Windows Vista in as little as 30 seconds, and access files at an average speed just over a tenth of a millisecond. Conversely, booting from a traditional notebook hard drive takes an average of 48 second, and the drives need 17 ms to access a file. (Think if all those milliseconds you'll never see again!) Perhaps more importantly, the SSDs are cooler, quieter, and have far lower power requirements than traditional hard drives, using use 0.9 Watts during active use compared to 1.9 Watts of a traditional hard drive. That means your notebook's battery lasts longer. And let's not forget the big selling point: no moving parts. Solid-state drives are far less likely to fail due to bumps, drops, shocks, or temperature changes. SanDisk's 2.5-inch 32 GB SSD is available now to computer makers, with an initial price of $350 per unit for volume orders. No word on when they'll be directly available to consumers or what their price might be—but we expect the answers are "soon" and "higher."
Post Your Comment...Comments
Benji on Mar 13th, 2007 at 1:15 PM:
I think traditional hard drives will be thing of the past. Perhaps they will just be used as mass storage and backup devices while flash drives take over.
Jason Howard on Mar 13th, 2007 at 3:46 PM:
It's the start of the eventual demise of hard drives as we know them today. I, for one, am excited. It couldn't come any sooner.
How to Build on Mar 13th, 2007 at 4:34 PM:
The hard drive is THE bottleneck in most laptops so this could be sweet way to boost performance and extend battery life. I'll take 3 thank you very much.
Marc Garrett on Mar 13th, 2007 at 4:58 PM:
I would have to think that SanDisk stock is a screaming buy right now.
Electronic Whiteboards on Mar 13th, 2007 at 5:03 PM:
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned anything about the new hybrid drives. These seem to be the future (until prices for solid state comes down) Yout can have your cake and eat it too. 8gb of solid state and 80gb of hard drive. Yeah, not quite as low power consumption but having the OS on your solid state should make things a lot faster.
Shredder
Joe on Mar 13th, 2007 at 5:48 PM:
This is not a hybrid, its a straigh 32GB man...
Kevin on Mar 13th, 2007 at 7:28 PM:
People were paying $350 for a 4gb usb flash drive 2 years ago so $350 for 32gb hdd is a good price point. The end user price will probably hit $500 which I don't think is outrageous for a new technology(yes i realized solid state drives have been around for a while but not for typical consumer hardware). Look at HDDVD and Blueray players right now going for $1000. In 5 years they'll be $50 at the local target or CVS.
friend on Mar 14th, 2007 at 3:15 AM:
Great news... we're finally getting to a point where we replace an archaic, wasteful, and fragile technology with a more logical and robust approach. To address the only obvious shortfall, memory density will quickly go up and prices will come down (and with market forces gathering behind solid state tech, the rate of innovation will be driven higher as well).
Dan Atkinson on Mar 14th, 2007 at 8:11 AM:
It's a no-brainer to say that eventually hard-disks will cease to exists in the same way that floppy disks are no longer around.
I do not, however, believe that flash is the solution.
One of the major limitations of flash memory is the erase-write limit. This can be overcome, and to an extent, made longer by wear-levelling, but this is only a temporary solution to an ongoing problem.
The flash technology is indeed better than traditional hdd technology, but it doesn't stand out enough. A 50% energy saving is a lot, but I don't feel that it'll be enough to warrant an overhaul in the storage retail industry. It might help push laptops through the magic 8 hour day though.
Jim Trosper on Mar 14th, 2007 at 5:46 PM:
Dan makes a good point. Good solid state memory can only sustain 1 million erase-write cycles per sector before going bad. While wear-leveling does decrease this effect somewhat, the limitation is still a major roadblock for solid state memory's ultimate replacement of the traditional platter-based hard drive.
One million erase-write cycles may seem like plenty, but if you take into account just how often your hard drive's sectors are written to and subsequently erased, such as a Windows pagefile, or your web browser's cache, these drives could quickly become paperweights.
Eduardo Aliaga on Mar 15th, 2007 at 9:36 AM:
I understand the time to access memory and read it is dramatically faster than traditional hard drives but what about the time it takes to write to the memory and the number of writes gauranteed compared to traditional hard drives? Does anyone have this information?
dumbfounder on Mar 24th, 2007 at 2:12 PM:
I can't wait to see some real-world database performance tests for this drive. VERY exciting stuff. Drives like this will change what is possible with information retrieval. At 10x the speed and capacities of a few hundred gigs (which I imagine are both only a few years away) we will start to see some awesome new technology emerging.
Franz on Mar 29th, 2007 at 3:58 PM:
The Sandisk 5000 (2.5 inch) has a maximum write speed of 45 MB/sec. The drive is 32 GB large and we estimate that every sector lasts for 1 million writes. Using the wear-leveling technique we would have to write 32 GB x 1 million = 32 million GB to reach the limit. This would take 32 GB x 1 million / 45 MB/s = 711 111 111 seconds or 22.5 years.
John on Apr 27th, 2007 at 9:16 PM:
I think the write limit is not as big of a problem as people think. Take a look at the white paper by San Disk on wear leveling.
http://www.sandisk.com/Assets/File/OEM/WhitePapers...
Of course do you want to belive the guys who are selling you the drive? Even 22 year calculated by Franz is a lot longer then most applications will ever need.
Chad Sichello on Apr 29th, 2007 at 1:04 AM:
It's not Apple with the solid-state plans, its Sony and its already on the market in Japan, the Vaio G1. It's been on the market for months, with luck, we'll probably see something this year in North America. They've already annouced that they will be releasing a 64Gb model either in the Fall or Spring of next year in Asia... again, we'll see it 12 months later, Apple will be playing catch up for awhile, they're not exactly trend setters when it comes to laptop technology, iPod, sure, but not with laptops, they're always at least a year or two behind the curve.
Bill Gervasi on Aug 22nd, 2007 at 4:38 PM:
Of course I love having 80 or 100 GB of disk in my notebook, but have to admit that partly it is because I don't bother cleaning my disk of old data. I also probably don't really need all those MP3s that are also on my MP3 player. I bet that I could get by with 32GB just fine.
Bill Thompson on Jan 11th, 2008 at 3:08 PM:
What's the likelihood of multi-drive configurations (C:, D:, E:) @ 32GB or a new 64GB to achieve the current 120GB HD levels? Unlike some writers I am using a great deal of the high capacity in my traveling Dell Precision and would like to have that available in a solid state configuration. But I am orderly and can use multiple drives to file in.
Bill Thompson on Jan 11th, 2008 at 3:08 PM:
What's the likelihood of multi-drive configurations (C:, D:, E:) @ 32GB or a new 64GB to achieve the current 120GB HD levels? Unlike some writers I am using a great deal of the high capacity in my traveling Dell Precision and would like to have that available in a solid state configuration. But I am orderly and can use multiple drives to file in.
Bill Thompson on Jan 11th, 2008 at 3:08 PM:
What's the likelihood of multi-drive configurations (C:, D:, E:) @ 32GB or a new 64GB to achieve the current 120GB HD levels? Unlike some writers I am using a great deal of the high capacity in my traveling Dell Precision and would like to have that available in a solid state configuration. But I am orderly and can use multiple drives to file in.
Bill Thompson on Jan 11th, 2008 at 3:08 PM:
What's the likelihood of multi-drive configurations (C:, D:, E:) @ 32GB or a new 64GB to achieve the current 120GB HD levels? Unlike some writers I am using a great deal of the high capacity in my traveling Dell Precision and would like to have that available in a solid state configuration. But I am orderly and can use multiple drives to file in.
Bill Thompson on Jan 11th, 2008 at 3:08 PM:
What's the likelihood of multi-drive configurations (C:, D:, E:) @ 32GB or a new 64GB to achieve the current 120GB HD levels? Unlike some writers I am using a great deal of the high capacity in my traveling Dell Precision and would like to have that available in a solid state configuration. But I am orderly and can use multiple drives to file in.
MightyMike on Feb 20th, 2008 at 8:07 AM:
It seems that these are still really rare, especially here in the UK. So far ive found them here http://www.portableparts.co.uk/products/Sandisk_32... for £250, anyone else know where you can get them?
KIM HERRICK on Mar 21st, 2008 at 8:57 PM:
22 years seems like a long time in computer technology, they will likely be obsolete also by that time, in comparison however, i have been lucky to get 4 years out of a mechanical unit before i start loosing sectors or it just crashes all together.. seems like a no brainer to me, im buying one right now on ebay!
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Ian Bell on Mar 13th, 2007 at 10:59 AM:
This just solidifies the rumor that Apple is working on a flash based laptop. I think this is great. $350 per 32GB is really spendy though, I think we would need to get close to 100GB for it to really make sense though. What do you guys think?