The netbook SSD revolution continues, as SanDisk releases speedy SSDs at a more reasonable price
Yesterday, at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, SanDisk Corporation highlighted its new models of solid-state drives. The company launched a SSD series for the ever-increasing netbook market and another one for laptop computers.
It seems that prices for solid drives have been decreasing lately, as the high-end 120GB SSD model from the manufacturer costs just under $250. While classic hard disk drives with similar capacity are much cheaper, analysts expect that SSD prices will further decline, as more and more people adopt this solution for data storage.
The G3 laptop model and the pSSD netbook model solid drives managed to deliver stunning performance when tested. Both of them recorded 200MB per second read speed and 140MB per second write speed. If these figures will turn out to be real when they will be reviewed, they would be even faster than Intel’s popular X25- SSD, which delivered about 250MB per second read speed and 70MB per second write speed.
The pSSD model is SanDisk approach to the netbook market. The 1.8-inch solid-state drive promises to deliver high read and write speeds at a reasonable price. The drives are built on the NAND Flash architecture and use SanDisk’s 43 nanometer multilevel cells. The new pSSD series are expected to be rolled up in February and will come in 8GB, 16GB, 32GB and 64GB versions.
More and more manufacturers are releasing solid drives that are aimed to netbooks, as this market has the fastest growth rate among all other portable computers categories. However, although SSDs seem to be more popular in the netbook area, many users were disappointed by their performance, according to general manager of SSDs at SanDisk, Rich Heye.
Many analysts believe that SSDs are becoming a more reliable choice, as they deliver higher performance than typical hard drives and new wear-leveling technology ensures that the drives will last longer.
Jim McGregor, an analyst at the In-Stat research company, stated that their studies show that people tend to pay an extra “4% to 5%” to get the advantages of SSD technology, as the market perceives the flash-based drives are being more robust, faster, and more economical.
While SanDisk markets its new SSD series as the perfect replacement for an old hard drive, McGregor pointed out that during this year, the most probable scenario would be that the California-based company would sell most of its units to laptop manufacturers, as an optional upgrade.
A SanDisk representative stated that the company’s new solid drives are the fastest on the market, as they are implemented with the ExtremeFFS file system that improves random write sequences, such as the behavior of background indexing and other services in Vista.
