SanDisk 35GB Flash Hard Drive

Solid state memory technology has been around a long time. The problem is that the price has kept it from replacing hard drives. That may be changing. Two years ago I highlighted some laptops that utilized flash hard drives. Those were more gimmicky than anything. But SanDisk just announced that they are producing the solid state drive (SSD) for laptops. The drive will increase the cost of a laptop by about $600 in the first half of 2007. I don’t think that cost will last long. My guess is that gaming enthusiasts will jump all over this because of its performance gains.

Considering that flash memory costs have been falling by about 50% per year, I think this will be a moot point soon. And just look at some of the gains of SSD:

“The SanDisk SSD announced today achieves a sustained read rate of 62 megabytes (MB) per second and a random read rate of 7,000 inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) for a 512-byte transfer – more than 100 times faster than most hard disk drives. Taking advantage of this performance, a laptop PC equipped with SanDisk SSD can boot Microsoft Windows^® Vista^™ Enterprise in as little as 35 seconds. It also can achieve an average file access rate of 0.12 milliseconds, compared with 55 seconds and 19 milliseconds, respectively, for a laptop PC with a hard disk drive.”

Another great feature of the drive is that it uses .4 watts during operation. This is opposed to magnetic hard drives which use 1.0 watt. This will help extend laptop battery life. Starting this technology on laptops is a natural choice. That’s because drives tend to be slower (though I recently purchased a 7200rpm drive for my laptop). And power is a big issue to laptop users. Also, laptops tend to get banged around more. This isn’t an issue with solid state drives. No more clicking hard drive here! Now it’s just a matter of time before this hits desktops. I can’t wait.

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