SanDisk SSDs Now Bigger, Faster than Before, Still Trail the Competition

Posted 06/01/2010 at 10:22am | by Paul Lilly

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Memory storage maker SanDisk made some headway in the solid state drive space today by introducing two new families of SSDs, the G4 (drop in replacements for HDDs) and P4 (for use in thin netbooks and tablets). Both families are built around an advanced 32nm multi-level cell (MLC) process technology and now come in capacities of up to 128GB for the P4 and up to 256GB for the G4.

"We designed our new SSDs with long-term consumer usage in mind," said Doron Myersdorf, senior director, SSD marketing, SanDisk. "Our drives offer faster boot times and improved system responsiveness while maintaining our uncompromising reliability standards. In addition, the drives utilize our Adaptive Flash Management (AFM) technology, which enables them to bridge the gap between demanding market requirements and increasingly challenging raw NAND flash characteristics."

On paper, performance is bit of a mixed bag. Sequential read and write speeds top out at up to 220MB/s and 160MB/s, respectively. That's a bit faster than the 120MB/s write speed threshold found on the G3, but not quite up to par with a number of new SSDs built around the vaunted SandForce SF-1200/1500 controllers that have started to appear.

Nevertheless, SanDisk did equip the new drives with a handful of performance-enhancing technologies, such as a page-based algorithm called ExtremeFFS designed to increase random write speeds and efficiency, and nCache acceleration technology, which SanDisk describes as a large non-volatile write cache technology intended to boost burst random write performance for shorter boot times, as well as to help present lag.

SanDisk says the new drives will start to show up in the third quarter. Pricing will depend on how many units top tier OEMs put on order.

Image Credit: SanDisk