SanDisk's new SSDs are designed for netbooks

Written by IT News on 12:27 AM

SanDisk has just announced its next-generation flash memory-based solid state drives, designed to provide storage support for the increasingly popular netbook market. According to the company, these new SSDs have been designed to provide both performance and high-capacity storage for those ultra-portable computer systems, known as netbooks. The new drives will be targeted towards computer system makers, as well as end-users.

“Netbooks represent the fastest growing PC segment in 2009 and 2010 yet widespread adoption of SSDs in netbooks has been limited by speed, capacity and cost constraints,” said Rich Heye, senior vice president and general manager, Solid-State Drives (SSD), SanDisk. “With the significant improvements in performance, capacity and low pricing, these SSDs are a perfect fit for the exploding netbook market.”

The next-generation SandDisk SSDs are expected to become available in capacities of 8, 16, 32 and 64GB in February 2009. These drives have been manufactured using a 43nm Multi-Level Cell flash memory and are produced at the fabrication plants in Yokkaichi, Japan. The technology on which these new drives have been built utilizes SanDisk's All Bit Line architecture.

According to the flash memory maker, the new SSD solutions for netbook computer systems will be aggressively priced, enabling them to be used in POS terminals, printers, ATMs and other applications that require a reliable storage solution.

The new SSD-P2 and SanDisk pSSD-S2 SSDs will perfectly fit the current market situation, as more portable computer system makers are expected to announce even more netbook systems. IDC initially projected that worldwide netbook sales would reach nine million units by 2012, however, that number has grown to 41 million, while this year 11 million netbooks are expected to be sold worldwide.

“SanDisk’s Gen 2 pSSD drives have the best combination of capacity, performance, weight, pricing and power advantages to really excite designers, manufacturers and users of netbooks,” said Richard Brown, VP of Marketing, VIA Technologies, Inc. “Our latest reference designs will include SanDisk’s Gen2 pSSD drives, and we look forward to working with SanDisk to aggressively address the netbook market’s needs.”