SanDisk Releases 32GB Solid State 2.5" Notebook Hard Drive

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A couple of months ago SanDisk introduced a 1.8&quot; sized flash based hard drive for notebook computers, they have now announced a more mainstream size 2.5&quot; size 32GB capacity SSD that could be dropped into any notebook and work right out of the gate.

SanDisk 32GB SSD (view large image)

The 2.5-inch SanDisk SSD is only going to be available directly to PC manufacturers initially, it will be offered as a drop in replacement for replacing existing hard drives. The cost to PC manufacturers will be about $350 per drive when purchased in bulk. That's a lot of money considering the relatively small 32GB sized, but prices are dropping and consider the benefits of a Solid State Disk:

• Lower power consumption than regular mechanical hard drive, SanDisk claims their drive is 50% more efficient than a regular hard drive as it uses 0.9 watts compared to the 1.9 watts of many regular hard drives
• Better reliability, according to SanDisk this drive is approximately six times more reliable than a regular hard drive (SanDisk claims its SSDs deliver 2 million hours mean time between failures (MTBF))
• Better performance, data moves to and from the SSD drive almost 100 times faster than a regular hard disk that use a mechanical head for reading and writing data
  • Read rate of 67 MB/s
  • Random read rate of 7,000 inputs/outputs per second for a 512-byte transfer
  • Windows Vista boots in about 30 seconds and can access files at an average speed of 0.11ms, a regular hard drive takes 48 seconds to boot Vista and 17 milliseconds to access a file
• Cooler and quieter running as there is no motor, bearings or moving head mechanism.
• More secure with data as a drop situation is less risky for losing data than the same situation with a regular mechanical hard drive

Although 32GB is a small amount of space, there's certainly an audience of buyers out there that would prefer this small and fast hard drive over a 200GB large and slow regular hard drive. They'd also be willing to pay the price premium. For some, all of the factors listed above make the higher price yet lower capacity worth it -- sometimes storage space isn't everything.

Either way, as the price of flash drops we're going to see more and more manufacturers offering these types of drives or moving to hybrid drives. There are many rumors that Apple will be offering a sub-sized notebook later in the year that will use this type of drive. It's likely many business notebook makers will start offering this as an option too.

SanDisk will be demoing their new SSD at CeBIT in Germany starting March 15th.

 

It says SATA, so does this mean I cannot drop it into my W3J?

 

That's very interesting.

 

we're beginning to see reasonable SSD prices (I mean more reasonable than 1000$ for 30gb ).
yes, 350$ is still very much, but step by step...

 

Thank you for sharing Andrew! This is good news. The Santa Rosa platform may not be offering much in terms of performance gains when compared to our current C2D set up.
However, when considering the small amount of NAND (Flash) in the chipset and hybrid hard drives. Santa Rosa laptops should be offering a grand total of 30 minutes more battery life to users. Which is nice since our overall performance seem to bottleneck at the hard drive in my opinion.

This SanDisk SSD is a good example of price becoming lower, and decreasing faster. take the price and divide by total GB you will get 11$ per GB. I'm sure if this came available to the public the price would be very similar, maybe 400$?

I personally wouldn't mind paying for 120$ ($1/gb) to $200 ($1.60/GB) for a 120GB SSD since that is how much my Asus V1JP has.

Thanks for comparing normal HDD to SSD, I only have 1 question, are you able to compare SSD read and write speeds to a HDD read and write speeds, in 2.5" notebooks HDD at all speeds, 4200rpm, 5400rpm and 7200rpm.

This would give me an idea of how much faster the drive would feel when doing hard drive intensive tasks.

Thanks,

MysticGolem

 

I wish SanDisk would make them available to the public, and I'm sure they eventually will as you're right they are becoming much more cost effective just in the past 6 months.

MG, I have attached a chart of performance, it's all that I can get from SanDisk in terms of performance but should have what you want.

 

I am very excited about solid state hard drives. Hopefully I can get one in my next laptop.
Tim

 

I want this one... i want a really solid one...coz i'll go hiking again soon...

 

Some might call me crazy, but as soon as they have this in 64GB for the same price or less - it's SSD for me!

I am glad to see this is really starting to push forward. The other thing people should consider is that for the benefits of SSD, using an external drive wouldn't be a bad option, which boosts capacity (lets be honest, most people don't need all of those files locally, its just convenient).

 

Sweet.

It's the access time that's mind blowing:

Of course, the value usually hovers around 9-12 for most HDs, but still - 0.11ms! Awesome.

 

$350 isn't that high for new technology. If if follows the standard model we should see 64GB within a year and sub-$200 prices. Frankly seeing the low power options I could see notebooks with two drives, one a solid-state boot drive and the other a "data" standard drive.

 

This is a great jump in technology and a major one over the less-popular hybrid drives (while they may consume less power, they actually decrease the lifespan of the HDDs itself since starting up the spinning of the platter is the cause of the most wear in HDDs).

32GB for roughly $400 is extremely pricey and it'll probably be another year or two before prices are lowered to the point where mass public acceptance can be reached (I'm just guessing $400 since the price of the SSD should be more than the manufacturer cost if the product is to generate any profit).

One thing SanDisk failed to mention and the rest of the posters failed to realize is the biggest disadvantage of all SSDs: the limited durability of clusters that can be rewritten on relative to that of the typical HDD.

I take note that a cluster can be rewritten over itself up to 10,000 times but seeing this SSD is just 32GB it might not be too difficult to accomplish that. Also, it is wise to note that writing on cluster doesn't only take place when you actually write a file to the disk but also for caching and whatnot.

That would be my biggest concern but irregardless, I'd probably still take the jump to SSD as the other performance specs are obviously much better than the typical HDD.

 

I'm suprised no companies have considered creating an SSD drive for PC card slots. If I could slot a 16GB SSD drive into the PC card slot and install Windows on it, then use a conventional 2.5" hard drive for storing infrequently accessed files then I'd get the best of both worlds. SSD drives don't need to be a specific shape, and all laptops have a card slot, so it wouldn't be hard to make one and there is probably a market for expandable fast storage.

 

Or how about having a network external hard drive (connected to your router at home/work) which you can access through the internet to retrieve files.
Of course you need an internet connection but with most new laptops offering HSDPA it's a realistic option.

Although don't count on retrieving DVD rips

 

Great review this drive was made for my T60!

 

The network attached storage is a great idea, I just have to get around doing it.

This is an interesting idea. I suppose it would have to be ExpressCard instead of PC Card (PCMCIA). It could just work...getting eSATA type speeds...

 

Yeah that could work but its physical card size is not very big. Also 16GB might be a little limiting especially with Vista and beyond...

Many older laptops have stacked dual PCMCIA slots which allowed double sized cards to be used. I had one of those Xircom modem/LAN cards years ago which didn't require any dongle because it was physically big enough to allow for it to be just plugged in. We really do need expresscard slot though otherwise it would bottleneck the performance. Shame there are not so many stacked dual slots in most laptops these days.

This might work better in the future as they pack higher densities into smaller spaces. I suppose they could extend it out an inch or two to fit more, like some cards do. I can see a real market for such a device.

 

Wonder if they could put two in one laptop so we could access 64 GB. Thanks for the heads up on these things.

 

I'm in the same boat as DTX's post above--can anything be done to make a PATA connection compatible with a SATA drive? I'm fortunate enough to own the venerable and vaunted ASUS V6VA and would love to add an SDD drive.
Thanks, Ragtopgeek.

 

If it was available for sale i would immediately grab one!

 

Anyone know what happens when you put an SSD into a laptop with a drop detector?

And does fragmentation become irrelevant (thus making partitionning irrelevant)?

 

That's what i thought too, until i saw this news:
http://www.tabletpcreview.com/default.asp?newsID=774
"Intel says the drive is also expected to meet an average mean time between failure (MTBF) of five million hours. If the drives meet this expectation, they will be a lot more reliable than their predecessors considering the average MTBF of a hard drive today is between 300,000 to 1,200,000 hours."

Anyways, limited rewrite cycles just like optical disks eh. Well i'm wondering if that's the case then there would be some kind of system control that would spread out the write cycles evenly on all clusters. And i'm wondering if there is such a thing as a varying random access time on a SSD, if fragmentation has any impact on performance.

 

How much of battery life are these drives supposed to save again? I barely use 15 gigs of storage so 32 gigs are more than enough for me for my new laptop (buying April-May?). Solid-state disk and GMA X3000 on a business laptop... now that'll be interesting.

 

Hey, Spare Tire - that's a good article (I saw that already) but I didn't really take too much consideration on it regarding SanDisk's latest release because I'm not even sure if the 32GB SSD is based off of NAND! It could be and if it is, then this SSD looks to be very promising!

But there's a lot of different variations in SSD technology (e.g. serial flash) so I couldn't draw the connection.

 

No, I'm afraid you are out of luck. AT least to my knowledge.

Well, it's a full 1.0 watt less to run...that could translate into 10-40% more battery life, depending on the things you do.

 

Too expensive, hopefully I'll be picking up a new Seagate Momentous 2.5" 160gb 7,200rpm drive if they're decently priced if not a 2.5" 120gb 7,200.

 

Even if it did spread read/write cycles across the disk to extend its durability, which I don't think is the case, it has incredible access & seek times which should alleviate problems associated with fragmentation.

This SSD has 0.11ms access time compared to notebook hard drives 15ms+ (about 150x faster). Mechanical drives struggle with fragmentation but SSD shouldn't have much issues. e.g. a file is fragmented into 10 pieces (blocks). It could take the mechanical HD a total of 1.5 seconds+ just to access the entire file whereas even if a file is fragmented into 100 pieces (blocks), it takes SSD about 0.11s or 11ms. A huge difference...

Please note I have simplified the example. It should be access & seek time used rather than just access time alone but you get the point SSD is lightning FAST.

 

if there will be a new apple sub-notebook; i think that the probability that it will include this or has this as an option is high.

i'm still not convinced that this type of drives (flash based) is reliable enough, as it has a limited write capabilities.

 

Don't get so hot and steamy over these drives. You have to have the Santa Rosa/Crestline chipset to be able to use these drives. They will not work with existing chipsets.

 

Are you serious? SSDs has been on the market for a long time. I don't think chipset has anything to do with it. The drive manages it's own internal logic, it just outputs the information like an ordinary HDD.

 

So, are you saying SanDisk is lying? The release they gave says you can drop it in any notebook and it will work.

 

SSD has been around for a while and you don't need Santa Rosa/Crestline chipset. Samsung 32GB SSD is already used in UMPC and also been tested in a notebook a while back by tomshardwareguide. The only thing is if Sandisk is charging vendors $350 for 32GB it might be somewhere around 1.5 times to double that if the consumer was to buy one.

 

Agreed about this! This has nothing to do with the PC you put it in!

At 64gb for that price, i will be a buyer. This with my spare battery in my 5760 = long usage time! w00t! At 32 gb I will be a little short on space. But at speed flash prices are going down, it won't be long before we see them.

 

How does SSD vs platter have *any* bearing on fragmentation... I don't think it matters... you'll still get fragmentation... just faster

 

You're mixing up solid state drives with Santa Rosa Robson flash technology. The two are remarkably different. SSD's function as hard drives that you can drop into any SATA-interfaced notebook. Robson functions as "quick RAM" that will work with Santa Rosa.

 

Ya i need 60 gb just for installed files so when it gets to 64 gb i might do the switch as well

 

My next notebook will have an SSD for sure, and once the 64GB ones come under $300, I will replace the 100GB hard drive I have currently.

 

I am using close to the 60 gb, but I could easily get to less than 40 gb, and I have 3 external hard drives that aren't full, so I would love to go to a moderately sized SSD. I call dibs on the SSD review (plus free product) for NBR!

 

Fragmentation is a function of the logical file system employed, not of the physical storage medium, i.e. disk or solid state. The individual blocks comprising a file could still become dispersed, but would you even notice the delay with this?

The improvement in access time is truly mind blowing. I wonder if this improved hardware will spur changes in the architecture of OS file systems?

 

The trend of dropping prices is encouraging. I remember when these things were being listed at over $1K. Hopefully by the time I'm considering a new notebook, the prices will have fallen enough and the capacity will be closer to 100 GB. Not that I need 100 GB .

 

I have a question then. If the SSD can read 2.5 times faster than an HDD does that mean if I were to install a game on an SSD that I would see great improvement in my frame rates?

 

Hi everyone,

Hi didn't see this thread so opened another one on a similar subject.
Transcend has presented some SSD using Express card. My question is the following: does anyone knows if this can be used in a computer with Express Card to install the OS so that the laptop boots directly from it instead of the normal hard drive? My A8js BIOS allows to boot from a removable media, HD, cd, and network. The question is if the express card can be considered as removable media...
If this worked, we could have a fast booting disk for the SO and other software and the normal HD where we could save all the rest of the stuff.

Best

 

Never heard of a computer being able to boot from an ExpressCard slot, sorry.

 

regarding framerates in games, it depends.
actually it would not increase frame rates. if you have enough memory to load the whole gameplay into the memory then it doesnt matter. it just loades up faster.

but if you dont have enough memory, the hdd will be used as extra memory. so you will see a big difference only if you have low amount of RAM installed on your pc.

one of my old computer did not have enough memory to play NFS HP2. so the hdd seemed to be in use most of the time. that was when i was using a 5.4k hdd. game loads was slow and game play lagged. then i had switched over to a 7.2k hdd. gameplay didnt lag much and load times vere significantly faster.

what do you think you'll see when you use an SSD?
but ofcourse today most gaming computers have more than 1GB ram.
and thats enough to run most games today if your running XP.
in this case youll just get better load times.

hope this answers your question.

 

whats the actual usable space?