SanDisk to offer solid state notebooks. Will it be worth it?
By Gareth Powell
SanDisk Corporation is launching a 32 gigabyte (GB), 1.8-inch solid state drive (SSD) as a replacement for the standard mechanical hard disk drive. With the declining cost of NAND flash memory SanDisk says the SSD is a viable and economically attractive alternative. It is projected to add $600 to the price of a laptop when it is available later this year. Is it going to be worth the extra money?
A press release states:
‘With no moving parts, it does not need to spin into action or seek files in the way that conventional hard disk drives do. These characteristics make it possible for this class of devices to deliver higher performance when compared with hard disk drives.
The SanDisk SSD achieves a sustained read rate of 62 megabytes (MB) per second and a random read rate of 7,000 inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) for a 512-byte transfer. People could expect a laptop PC equipped with SanDisk SSD could boot Microsoft Windows Vista Enterprise in as little as 35 seconds.’
You can, if you like, expect that, but massive speed increases do not seem likely. How do we know this?
Fujitsu has created a notebook using a solid state dtive and this video (on YouTube) shows the speed difference between a flash-based notebook and a typical HDD-based system. There is simply not very much in it.
You can time the video yourself but if the saving is much more than five seconds I will be very, very surprised. So with the Fujitsu Q30SSD you get 32GB of storage capacity and currently it is selling in South Korea for around $3,700. This is roughly the same technology so we can expect the speed differences on the SanDisk drive to be about the same. That is, faster but not faster enough for you to want to pay $600 extra.
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