Sandisk officially launches 32GB flash drive

WHILE YOURS TRULY is en route to unusually sunny Hangover, our e-mail inbox got greeted with an official press release of Sandisk's 2.5-inch 32GB solid-state drive.

We first talked about this device here. The 1.8-inch device was first mentioned here.This capacity has been chosen based upon performance and price, since the firm expects that this model will be the first to start nibbing the position of conventional magnetic hard drives.

The main benefits of the drive should be increased reliability, with over two million hours MTBF (Mean Time Between Errors), stable power draw (increasing battery life) and risk-free data protection when a notebook is accidentally dropped.

Unlike my first SSD drive, a 32GB Samsung one (which is tucked nicely in Q30Plus-SSD notebook), this Sandisk pup offers far greater performance at less that a half of the price yours truly had to shelve out.

Sandisk rightfully compares their 32GB drive with a typical notebook drive with 5400 rpm, even not touching the area of 4200rpm ones, which dominate the subnotebook space. Preliminary results show that burst rate of SSD drive is equal to sustained one, and that is 67MB/s. Classical hard drives may have the edge in burst speeds, but when it comes to sustained read or write speed, SSD should have no competition.

Sandisk also provided boot time difference - it takes 30sec to load Windows Vista Enterprise on a system with 32GB SSD drive, while identical notebook with classical 5400rpm drive will take 48sec, with much slower access time to files. Company execs stated that the company expects to see per-gigabyte price of SSD storage to come down and at the same time capacity should grow to typical sub-notebook sizes. One thing is certain - when 64GB SSD drive appears with a price of a 100GB drive, a quantum shift will happen. Not many people would choose not to sacrifice capacity over significantly increased battery life.

However, in order for all of this to come true, we would expect that Sandisk provide a significant number of test units to independent testing organizations, so that we can see the performance measured in real world environments. µ