SanDisk shows solid-state drive

SanDisk expects to ship the drive to notebook manufacturers this 
quarter

by Melissa J. Perenson   
http://computerworld.com
 
January 08, 2007 (PC World) -- SanDisk today showcased its newly 
introduced 32GB solid-state drive at the Storage Visions conference 
in Las Vegas. SanDisk's model joins Samsung in the nascent 
solid-state drive market; Samsung announced its drive in March 2006. 

SanDisk's SSD was engineered by the company's new Israel-based 
Computing Solutions Division (part of SanDisk's acquisition of 
M-Systems). The 1.8-in. drive is designed to replace the hard drive 
in devices that usually rely on that form factor.

Says Doreet Oren, director of product marketing, "The drive is 
targeted at the mobile PC user and road warrior, who need the 
reliability, durability, high performance and low power consumption 
that flash solid-state drives provide over hard disks."

Advantage over hard drives

The advantages to SSD are multifold. SSD has no rotating parts, 
unlike hard disk drives, which rely on rotating media to store data. 
This means increased reliability and durability. The SanDisk 32GB 
SSD is rated at 2 million hours mean time between failure, as 
compared with about 300,000 hours for a hard disk drive. And the 
SanDisk can withstand a 1,500G shock during operation, vs. 500G 
on a typical hard disk drive.

SSD also has a speed advantage: The drives are about twice as fast 
a typical 1.8-in. hard disk drive. SanDisk says that its sustained 
transfer read/write speeds are 62MB/sec. and 36MB/sec., ratings 
that just best Samsung, at 57MB/sec. and 32MB/sed. SanDisk says 
its transfer speeds translate into a real-world performance boost as 
well. When booting Windows Vista Enterprise (on a notebook running 
Intel's 1.2-GHz Core Duo Processor ULV U2500 and 1GB of DDR2-533 
SDRAM), the Vista booted in 35 seconds on SanDisk's SSD drive, 
as compared with 55 seconds for a 1.8-in. hard disk drive.

Another bonus is power efficiency. SSD drives on a whole are 
lower-powered than 1.8-in. hard disk drives. The SanDisk SSD 32GB 
model requires no spin-up power, and requires just 0.4 watt during 
read/write operations, as compared with 1.0 watt for a 1.8-in. hard 
drive. SanDisk's Oren estimates this power savings equates to about 
a 10% longer battery life.

Additionally, SSD allows support for a wider range of operating 
temperatures than hard disk drives and lower noise noise levels. 
The SSD has a 0dB rating, as compared with Toshiba's 1.8-inch 
hard disk drive's noise rating of 22dB.

"It wasn't an issue of the difficulty in creating 32GB; we've done high 
capacity flash drives for the military and aerospace," says Oren. 
"The issue was building an ASIC tailored for the mobile pc market, 
with lower cost and low power consumption, and high performance. 
32GB is a sweet spot we feel that the value of this product is worth 
the cost." The SSD 32GB is SanDisk's fifth generation SSD product, 
but it's the company's first targeted at consumer product suppliers.

What's ahead for SSD

SanDisk expects to ship the drive to notebook manufacturers this 
quarter, and estimates the first high-end notebooks equipped with 
the drive will appear in the first half of 2007. The expected premium 
to end-users is currently $600; however, says Oren, "flash prices 
are always changing; it's not a constant."

Looking ahead, adds Oren, "We expect in 2007 to add a 2.5-in. drive, 
and capacities up to 64GB; the road map for the next few years calls 
for up to 128GB. And in the second half of 2007, we expect to have 
a SATA interface as well." The initial drive offering uses SLC 
(single-level cell) flash; an MLC version is also expected later this 
year.

While at the outset, Samsung expects to see SSD drives appear in 
high-end and corporate notebooks aimed at business users. 
Industry experts expect the demand for such solid state drives to 
remain miniscule in the immediate years following their launch. 
However, Oren says, "Eventually, I expect this to move into the 
consumer laptop market, and not just the business user." Although 
it's plausible that the SSD might appear in other consumer devices 
that rely on hard disk drive technology, Oren says the company has 
not explored migrating the SSD to other devices at this time.