Sandisk's flash hard drive shows a nice turn of speed

WHILE CES DIDN'T offer much new and exciting technology, the main point of this trade show is showing the commercialisation of the technologies we have written about for the last several years.

Sandisk is entering the market with its solid state drive, and the model is showing really good performance numbers. We're talking about a device which is set to go against 1.8-inch hard disk drive, which usually spin at 3800 or 4300 rpm, so reaching the performance delta of those drives was not so problematic as the performance offered by 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch HDDs.

Sandisk's SSD 1.8-inch comes in a capacity of 32GB and offers much better power consumption - with a claimed maximum draw of 0.4W. With the drive not having any moveable parts, spin-up and spin-down wattage being zero (1.7-1.8W on HDD), and idle staying at 0.15W instead of 0.33W - it is clear that the power consumption is reduced significantly.

Also, the dry wattage numbers would not mean much if a hard drive was a device with linear power consumption but, with a hard drive often having spikes on the battery, SSD has the advantage of prolonging the lifespan of the battery by 15-20 per cent, easily offering up to an hour longer battery life. But the main advantage of SSD vs. conventional 1.8-inch drive is the speed. Sandisk's SSD comes with extremely fast performance for the flash-based drives, specced at 65MB/s for read and 35MB/s for write. Access time is 0.12ms, while seek time does not exist.

With the introduction of this drive, prices of flash drives vs. classic will be reduced to 5-6x price premium over classic, instead of today's 12-15x

Mass production is stated for late Q2, and first notebooks on the market should start appearing in late Q3. For Yuletide '07, we can now say that getting a notebook with SSD drive will be an alternative, not a niche part. µ

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