Laptops Get Solid Storage

By Greg McNevin

January 8th, 2007: Solid state hard disks are about to make their debut in the upper echelons of the notebook market with SanDisk announcing its first 32GB, 1.8-inch drive.

Aimed at enterprise users, SanDisk says the drive is the first step toward mass consumer adoption of Solid State Disk (SSD) technology, previously only used for military and aerospace applications.

Flash technology such as SanDisk’s NAND is less prone to shocks and vibration damage, offers significant performance gains and uses less power than conventional hard disk technology. For example, SanDisk says it’s SSD offers a sustained read rate of 62MB per second and a random read rate of 7,000 inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) for a 512-byte transfer – over 100 times faster than most hard disk drives.

The company claims that a laptop equipped with its SSD can boot Microsoft Windows Vista Enterprise in as little as 35 seconds and boasts an average file access rate of 0.12 milliseconds, compared with 55 seconds and 19 milliseconds respectively for today’s standard hard drives.

Longevity and wear issues with flash have also been addressed, according to SanDisk, it has improved its technology and wear-levelling algorithm to give the device a mean time between failure (MTBF) of two million hours, or almost 230 years.

While some see 32GB of storage as somewhat underwhelming compared to today’s abyssal storage options, business users rarely use significant amounts of space on their laptops, and enterprise storage is handled predominately by a data centre anyway. When these factors are taken into account the gains made in speed, durability and battery life could make SSDs very attractive indeed for road warriors.

SanDisk sees the inclusion of its SSD in notebooks increasing the end-user price by around US$600. The first models should be available in the first half of 2007.

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