SanDisk upgrade drive takes SSDs to Extremes
There's a growing interest in solid state disk drives (SSDs) as a way to speed up ultraportable laptops, thanks partly to their appearance in Apple MacBook Air and Intel Ultrabook-style machines. SanDisk is now targeting the upgrade market with an Extreme SSD in consumer packaging. Suggested retail prices are £122 for the 120 gigabyte version, and £239 for 240GB. SanDisk says a 480GB version will be available later this year, and Amazon.co.uk has priced it at £920.64.
Ultrathin laptops use Flash memory chips without cases to save space, but SanDisk's Extreme SSD is packaged to replace a traditional 2.5-inch hard drive in a laptop or desktop PC with a SATA connection up to 6Gbps.
SanDisk claims the Extreme SSD is 10 times faster than a regular 7,200 RPM hard disk drive, and consumes 30 percent less power. It says it "boots a PC in less than 16 seconds and quickly shuts down the system". Sleep/resume speeds would be more intering, because most people with modern operating systems probably don't reboot their PCs often enough for that to be a big deal.
However, the Extreme SSD could have a stronger appeal to computer games players, who tend to have high-end PCs. SanDisk says: "For gamers, the SanDisk Extreme SSD can launch applications in a fraction of the time and reduce in-game delays by generating environments faster during sequence transitions. This is particularly important during massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs)." It would obviously help business users, too.
SanDisk claims that the "Extreme SSD is more reliable and durable than a hard disk drive". Anecdotally, SSDs appear to have quite a high failure rate, but SanDisk could cover that by offering a longer guarantee.
SanDisk's suggested retail prices for Extreme SSDs are lower than its current range of Ultra SSDs, but the Ultra range is available at substantial discounts. Rival suppliers have also offered Extreme SSD products, including Corsair and OWC.
SanDisk is also offering an X100 version of its SSD to PC manufacturers. This offers from 32GB to 512GB of storage space.
SanDisk Extreme SSD