Sandisk rises to the occasion with PSSD

PSSD IS THE NEW SANDISK brand for the company's just-launched Parallel ATA Solid State Drive range. These are the new SSDs aimed at the ultra-low cost PC’s of the ilk that are all around us of late, with products arriving from ASUS, DELL, ACER and we expect many many others too.

The new line of flash memory-based solid-state drives is designed for the emerging new category of portable consumer electronics – known as ULCPCs, netbooks or crappy lappies, depending on how you look at the market. Sandisk trademarked PSSDs (Parallel ATA Solid State drive) are available in 4, 8 and 16 Gigabyte modules, with a streaming read speed of 39 megabytes per second (MB/s) and streaming write performance of 17MB/s. Operating Systems supported at this time are both Linux and Microsoft Windows XP.

The drives are expected to be available in August, built using the company’s Multi-Level Cell (MLC) and Single-Level Cell (SLC) flash memory. The technologies behind this are produced at fabrication plants in Yokkaichi, Japan, where Sandisk and its partner, Toshiba Corporation, share the output. The two companies have co-developed many of the designs and technologies around NAND flash.

These are all being shown this week at Computex in Taipei – if you can afford the airfare. µ