SanDisk Targets Consumers With Its "New" Ultra SSD

Posted 07/26/2011 at 10:13am | by Brad Chacos

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We've heard it before; solid state drives are the wave of the future. Spinning platters and read/write heads are so, like, 2008. In the recent weeks, we've heard about pricing woes from DRAM manufacturers that could well lead to NAND making strides in the memory market. SanDisk's beating the SSD drum, too. The company's just released the consumer-orientated Ultra SSD, which it says can replace traditional HDDs and extend the life of your poor beaten-down old PC.

"The new SSD can extend the life of desktop and notebook PCs, and offers greater performance, durability and power efficiency than a hard disk drive," SanDisk proudly boasts in its press release. (See? We told you they said it.) Calling the Ultra SSD "new" is a bit of a stretch; the same hardware has been offered to OEMs for a while now.

The SATA 2.0 interface used by the Ultra SSD delivers a 280MB/s sequential read speed and 270MB/s sequential write speeds. "Up to 3 Gb/s random speeds surpass other SATA II SSDs and enable faster system boot and application launch times," SanDisk claims. The company also brags about the Ultra SSD's low power consumption – appealing to laptop users – and claims to have achieved a 1 million Mean Time Between Failure rating during internal stress tests.

"Replacing a computer's hard disk drive with the SanDisk Ultra SSD is more cost effective than buying a new PC," said Kent Perry, SanDisk's Director of Product Marketing.

You can pick up a 60GB, 120GB or 240GB Ultra SSD for prices ranging from $130 to $450.