The company has brought to CES 2009 its new G3 series SSDs, which will be available in 60-, 120- and 240-gigabyte sizes. The manufacturer suggested retail price is $149, $249 and $499, respectively.

 

SanDisk launched the series with a 2.5-inch model, the C25-G3, and a 1.8-inch version, the C18-G3. Both devices are designed as drop-in replacements for HDDs in laptops.

 

Last year, SanDisk introduced two new metrics: vRPM and LDE, which help users evaluate SSDs (solid-state drives). The Virtual RPM (vRPM) enables comparisons in performance between an SSD and a hard disk drive or another SSD, while LDE calculates the lifespan of a solid-state drive. The metrics were introduced in order to help overcome lingering customer concern over SSD performance and endurance.

 

According to the company the SSDs from the G series have 40,000 vRPM. The SanDisk drives read and write data at 200 MB per second and 140 MB per second, respectively.

 

The SSDs are regarded as the future of storage. Instead of spinning platters that can never spin quite fast enough to keep up, SSDs store data on memory chips. Early models have been both prohibitively expensive and of capacities that were too meagre to be of interest. Things are different now, though, and an SSD just might be the best choice for your storage needs.

 

Most SSDs today come in the 2.5-inch form factor, which means they're the same size as today's notebook and laptop computer hard drives. And they use today's SATA connectors, so no special cabling is required to hook them up to recent-vintage computers.

 

Most of today's notebooks will recognise SSDs as a conventional hard drive, with no further driver or software installation necessary. Occasionally you may need to update the "chipset" software for your notebook's motherboard, however, in order for the drive to be usable in your system.

 

The only downside of SSDs is their price. You'll spend $200 or more for a 64 gigabyte SSD, whereas the same $ 200 will buy you two 1-terabyte traditional hard drives. Still, for notebook users, SSDs make sense now. Here's hoping that in 2009 prices for SSDs fall and capacities increases, making them worthwhile for desktop computer users as well.