SanDisk fine-tunes SSDs for netbooks

Flash memory company SanDisk is to release its first solid-state drives and memory cards that are designed specifically for use in netbooks.

SanDisk unveiled its P2 and S2 parallel ATA solid-state drives (pSSDs) at the Computex trade show in Taiwan on Tuesday. The company said the drives would offer a non-volatile cache of up to 320MB, to improve efficiency and extend battery life.

"Full-featured operating systems make tremendous demands in the storage device — writing large amounts of data in fast bursts using small random transfer sizes," Doreet Oren, director of product marketing for SanDisk, said. "SanDisk pSSD drives with nCache offer up to 50 times the random write performance of our first-generation SSDs, delivering on the SSD promise for netbooks."

The drives, which will be available in capacities of 8GB, 16GB, 32GB and 64GB, were developed in conjunction with Canonical to optimise them for the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, in a further attempt to improve battery life.

"Engineers from SanDisk and Canonical, the creator of the popular Ubuntu Linux-based operating system, have worked closely on system optimisations for the Gen2 pSSD, resulting in improved system responsiveness and longer battery life," the SanDisk statement read.

Also at Computex, SanDisk launched its Netbook SDHC memory cards, which come in 8GB and 16GB capacities.

"Our Netbook SDHC card helps consumers get the most out of their netbooks by increasing storage capacity and providing a reliable means of transferring data from the netbook to a removable storage device or another PC," Eric Bone, vice president of retail product marketing for SanDisk, said.

No UK pricing was available for the cards at the time of writing. However, the Netbook SDHC cards can be ordered from the SanDisk's US website at $39.99 (£24.22) for the 8GB version and $79.99 for the 16GB version.