SanDisk Announces Release of 32GB Solid State Drive

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SanDisk today announced they're releasing a 32GB, 1.8-inch solid state drive (SSD) as a drop-in replacement for the standard mechanical hard disk drive. The drive will be costly, SanDisk said it will cost $600 more than a regular hard drive -- meaning about $800 - $1,000. SanDisk will be demoing the drive and talking more about it at the CES show in Las Vegas next week.

SanDisk 32GB 1.8&quot; Solid State Drive (view large image)

Why is SSD better?

There's a few reasons solid state flash is superior to the traditional hard drive that uses a mechancial head to read data from a platter:

• Fewer moving parts so less hard drive failures
• Lower power consumption, consumes 0.4 watt during active operation compared to 1.0 watt of regular hard drives
• Faster access to data, sutained reads of 62 MB/s. In some burst instances an SSD can be 100 times faster than a mechanical hard drive

SanDisk indicated that using that a drive loaded with Windows Vista Enterprise fully booted in a very fast 35 seconds. Of course, these numbers are all in house benchmarks quoted by SanDisk so they need to be taken with a grain of salt. All the same, it's great to see the largest flash memory manufacturer moving into the notebook space to provide drives. The costs are high for SSD at the moment, but more competition and innovation will drop those prices.

The 32GB SanDisk drive is available immediately to manufacturers (OEMs), there is no indication as to whether the drive will be sold through consumer channels.

 

i'm happy about all, except price...

 

This is without any doubt a great development. I am using a 1.8" 60 GB 4200 rpm in my Dell X1, and the hard drive is very very slow. It causes a major bottleneck in my system.

But like stated, it is just too expensive...

Charlie

 

This is great! I want to see this drive in my iPod...or a D420 for under 2k.

 

I can't wait to see this technology grow. It will be great for laptop users. Hopefully when I buy my next laptop it will be available at a reasonable price.
Tim

 

can't wait until they hit the $0.50/gb price point...I would even pop for one at a $1/gb but until then they are a nice boutique device. Face it the production cost as well as component cost have to be significantly less then mechanical HDDs. So, the cost per gb needs to decrease. But all forms of memory are waaaay inflated...one of the few production items that is priced as a commodity.

I am sure folks here will all benefit from the 65-ish % decrease in power consumption too! Suddenly our standard batteries will get another hour or more life. COOL!!

 

This is cool. Lets wait for other manufacturers to also get into the SSD consumer market and eventually the price will fall. With the small form factor, our notebooks will get significantly lighter and battery lasts longer.

 

Hopefully the market (and more importantly the HD manufacturers) adopts SSD quickly so that it can start to compete in the HD market and be adopted by consumers relatively quickly.

I'd like to see one of those in my next notebook, sure.

 

I have been reading that the solid state drives have a limited amount of read and writes, I think that this is going to be its biggest hit. Of course they will come up with gages that tell how many reads and writes are left so you wont loose all of your data, but still. How would you like your $600 drive to be useless after one years?

The prices will definitely come down and quickly to, if these drives follow the path of other Solid state memory devices. Currently a 8GB SD card goes for around $100 so put four of them together and thats already around $400 for the 32GB Flash HD drive. At least thats a little more feasible than $600-$1000.

 

not necessarily true.
highest (i think) SSD HDD's MTBF is 2mil hrs compared to regular HDD's 600thou hrs

you should check this out also, especially the "mortality rate" section:
http://www.storagesearch.com/bitmicro-art3.html

 

I wonder when NRAMs will hit the street

 

it is actually fairly simple to envision building one of these for you notebook. there are CF to ide adapters. i've been strongly considering yanking out my dvd drive that i do not use and putting a 2-8GB flash drive in.

under linux you can use compression on your hibernate/resume image so you probably would need about half of the flash as you have installed ram to create a fast static non-dish hibernate mode.

i could not find 60MB/s stuff the article author cites in CF form factor, but i believe we will see it soon. using that number and some compression (WAG 50%) if your notebook had 1GB of ram, theoretically, you could come out of hibernate in 1024^3 * .5 / ( 60 * 1024^2) or approximately 9s. while that is a bit slower than standby, keep in mind your notebook uses no power in hibernate mode, but standby will drain your system over night if you have a weak battery or charge. standby has to keep full power to ram and keeps other devices in sleep mode (low power, but not no power).

 

$800 for a 32GB??? No thanks. I think I'll keep my 120GB hard drive for now.

 

62.4mb/s wow thats fast. thats like a desktop 74gb raptor...almost

 

Yea I could definitely see these drives becoming popular with gamers, especially since they do not produce much heat and would not put much strain on the PSU because they supposedly use a lot less power. Also with a 60+mb/s they could get really fast. So there you have it a fast low power low heat drive, sound ideal doesn't it? now if only the price would come down a little more.

 

No offense or anything to SSD drives, but I have been waiting for these things to get to 1$ per gb or even 0.50$ per gb, but right now I know they face slow speeds, but have the potential to be blazing faster after being more mainstreamed.

In my opinion hard drives are the bottleneck of computers in general, and yes I do believe Raptor drives are too slow, when comparing to the potential of SSD. Mind you Raptors are nice.

Sandisk stated 35 seconds boot up for Vista...pssh in my opinion that is SLOW! My current desktop boots Windows XP Pro with a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 in 35 seconds.

I personaly want to see Vista or Windows XP Pro boot up in 10-12 seconds using the fastest SSD possible.

Also i am interested in multi-tasking hard drives, right now I know having a Dual Core CPU, with 2GB of ram, but with 1 Hard drive....that limits your multi-tasking ability. I would love 1x SSD to be able to multi-tasks as efficiently has 2 or more physical hard drives in a computer.

That is what I would ideally want. And Yes, I feel my computing abilities to be now hindered by the hard drive being to slow when multi-tasking, but fast when doing single tasks.

Note: My P4 computer can multi-tasks better hard drive wise, but the bottle neck is the CPU, since the P4 doesn't cut it anymore.

PS: for those who don't know, my review of the V1JP also compares my 2 desktops, in the comparison section, if you wanna check that out.

PS: I know SSD will become better with time, i am not bashing it, but heck i want more...lol, and of course want to use one in my laptop in the future.

Thanks,

MysticGolem

 

How does the SSD work?

 

I thought a flash hd would save alot of battery power but its only .6 watts difference. probably gives you an advantage of one more bar of screen brightness. I think I'll just buy 2 extra batteries on a laptop.

 

come come now, thats not the attitude of progression

 

Man, I love these solid state drives. Please dear lord, make them for ultraportables.

You can get it even faster. Disable autodetection for your unused IDE/ATAPI channels/controllers in Device Manager, and shut off other junk you don't use (floppy drives, infrared ports, etc.). Also streamline your Registry Startup programs. And if you are on a standalone machine (i.e. not networked), make sure your harddrive isn't wasting time for any kind of command queueing or other time-wasting stuff you don't need.

Using a WD Raptor 1500, my XP boottimes are around 10-15 seconds -- not an exaggeration. I get like two of those scan lines in the Windows XP black screen, and BOOM, I'm in instantly. And yes, the WD 1500 is absurdly fast -- but for the lightning-fast boot, I had to disable the wasteful NCQ (useless command queue). The WD 1500 Raptor screams like no other.

 

So this is a 1.8 inch drive.

Is there already a 2.5 inch version of this? And is it cheaper?

 

Yes, there is a 2.5 inch version, at least from Samsung. Check out this link:

http://tgdaily.com/2007/01/03/samsung_32gb_ssd/

This link is taken from a previous recent article here in Notebookreview.com

http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3427

Peace.

Houzy.

 

Awesome, that's good to hear! Of course we believe you, but how do you find Hard Drive Multi-Tasking with 1 Drive. Or do you have 2 Raptors? Do you feel any bottle necking? I do with my system and i blame the hard drive for it.

As previously mentioned, having 2 hard drives greatly improves multi-tasking, since everything needs to go through the Hard drive, and in my opinion that is the bottle neck of current high performance laptops.

I am looking for a all round solution, a BIG hard drive, fast, and cheap, and at the time of purchasing, the 320GB Seagate Barrracuda 7200.10 is the best, and still is now.


So i am hoping that SSD technology to be really darn fast, maybe even faster than all Raptors too.

Thanks,

MysticGolem

 

Sorry to rain on the optimism parade but Fujitsu has a first answer to those wondering how much faster your SSD equipped laptop may be:

http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/laptops/hard-drive-race-off-ssd-vs-hdd-225398.php

Taking a look at the video gives me some hope but I won't pay a significant premium for those gains. I felt (didn't measure) that switching from a 5400 rpm drive to a 7200 rpm drive gave me the same performance benefit. With 300 GB HDDs on the horizon I think that the platter density of a 300 GB HDD may make it just as fast, if not faster than a 32 GB SSD drive. Having 10 times the storage space is just an added benefit.

 

Actually, I like what I saw in the video. Thanks for the heads up Abaxter, now if only the price would come down.

 

I'd pay $5/GB. Just imagine - no moving parts in a laptop !!!
I'd buy a 40GB SSD @ $200, to store OS and some imp data. Rest of data will be store on an external normal HDD.

 

I'd go for a system like this too. With the SSD holding essential files for security (and at an added price premium), but a 2nd traditional HDD for my ever-growing iTunes library.

The video I posted a link to above is interesting and a lively discussion of its merits can be found below the video. One of the most intriguing comments is by n3ldan who says that ''sequential read/writes in SSD are SLOWER than in HDD.'' Does anyone know what this will mean in terms of performance?

 

SSD is going to be wave of the future. Anything with less or no moving parts is.

 

too expensive....