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Cheap as Chips

SanDisk unveils feisty new range of solid-state drives.

By Nathan Davis on 9 January, 2009

In more news trickling out of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, SanDisk has shown the world its shiny new range of solid-state drives (SSDs) it calls the G3 Series.

Not only are they faster, according to the company, but they’re cheaper. The latter is fantastic news, because price is by far an area in which the mechanical platter-based hard drives reign supreme over SSDs. Especially so when the difference is around three to four dollars per gigabyte of storage on SSDs, compared with less than twenty cents on regular hard drives.

Gizzards: Of a G3 Series SSD.Surprisingly, SanDisk didn’t leave us hanging on the usually very precise ‘aggressive pricing’, as it actually supplied some numbers. The available models come in flavours of 60GB, 120GB, and 250GB, with the suggested retail prices sitting at US$149, US$249, and US$499 respectively. Form factors are 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch, with the target clearly being notebooks, where hard drives are one of the problematic power suckers.

On the speed front, the company was bold enough to claim this is the world’s fastest multi-level cell, solid-state drive family, comparing the speed with that of a hypothetical 40,000rpm hard drive. SanDisk claims a read speed of 200MB/s and a 140MB/s write speed, although these are apparently theoretical, placing them under the “anticipated sequential performance” banner which makes us wonder if they even benchmarked to get these results.

Sequential performance is of little relevance when it comes to regular desktop use, as random read/write performance is far more indicative, and also quite a bit slow on SSDs. Curiously, OCZ’s Vertex SSDs are also based on the multi-level cell technology, and they read at the same speed while writing 20MB/s faster at 160MB/s, so I guess that blows SanDisk’s ‘fastest’ claim right out of the water.

That said, OCZ’s 250GB SSD as announced mid-December launched at a suggested retail price of US$869, so regardless of whether they’re actually increasing in performance, it’s great to see solid-state drives dropping in price.

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