SanDisk Boosts Flash Offerings

June 6, 2007: Revving up storage speed and capacity, SanDisk has announced both a 64GB version of its 1.8” solid state disk (SSD) drive and a new line of speedy and secure USB flash drives aimed specifically at business and enterprise users.

Earlier this year SanDisk announced its 32GB notebook SSD, promising cutting edge data access and transfer speeds, vastly improved battery life and decreased heat dissipation. Now the company has kicked the capacity of its new baby up a notch, doubling the models capacity while retaining its 67 MB/s data read rate and hasty 7000 IOPS (inputs/outputs per second) rate.

Speed is what SSDs are all about, and with this in mind the company claims that the drive can boot Windows Vista Enterprise in around 30 seconds, compared to an average 48 seconds using traditional magnetic storage. It also puts file access at 0.11 milliseconds instead of the 17 milliseconds seek time in traditional drives.

While the 32GB version of the drive is available now from big names such as Dell, the 64GB SSD is currently scheduled for production before the end of 2007.

Next to the larger SSD, the company has also announced new Cruzer USB flash drive models, the Professional and the Enterprise.

With misplaced storage devices (and the critical data often contained on them) making regular headlines, SanDisk has taken a more secure approach to its new drives by implementing hardware-based 246-bit AES encryption. It claims that this is more reliable than software-based solutions as the device does not have to rely on a host machine when locking and unlocking data.

“USB flash drives offer an inexpensive and convenient way to carry large amounts of digital information in a pocket or purse, yet without proper security these benefits become a huge threat to businesses of all sizes,” said Yariv Fishman, product manager for enterprise solutions in the USB business unit at SanDisk. “Cruzer Professional and Cruzer Enterprise are business tools, from a trusted leader in USB flash drives, which help ensure confidential data remains confidential – even if the drives themselves are lost or stolen.”

The Business model features a “Privacy Zone” which can be set to a specific size, data copied to this portion of the drive is encrypted while the rest can be accessed freely. The Enterprise model on the other hand features mandatory password protection for the whole drive, ensuring all data is protected if the drive is lost or stolen.

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