SanDisk 32GB Notebook Solid State Drive

SanDisk announced a 32GB, 1.8-inch solid state drive (SSD) as a drop-in replacement for notebook drives. The company is targeting business users and consumers.

Previously, large capacity flash-based drives had been used primarily by the military, aerospace and telecom industries, which demanded high performance and reliability under challenging environmental conditions.

The SanDisk SSD reads 62 megabytes per second and a random read rate of 7,000 inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) for a 512-byte transfer ““ more than 100 times faster than most hard disk drives. Taking advantage of this performance, a laptop PC equipped with SanDisk SSD can boot Vista  in as little as 35 seconds, about 40% faster than normal disk drives.The SanDisk consumes less than half the power of a hard disk drive.

The 32GB SSD will add about $600 to the cost of notebooks and is now available to OEMs .