SanDisk Corporation is expanding its line of solid state drive (SSD) products with the introduction of a 64 gigabyte (GB) SSD aimed at both enterprise users and early adopter consumers such as gamers.

SanDisk 1.8-inch UATA 5000 and 2.5-inch SATA 5000 SSD products, which already are available in a 32GB capacity, are compatible as drop-in replacements for hard disk drives in most mainstream notebook computers.

Compared to conventional hard drives found in most notebook computers, SSDs offer better performance due to the lack of mechanical parts. The flash-based SSD starts working almost immediately to achieve better access speeds than a conventional hard disk drive. SanDisk says that in notebook computers, data moves to and from an SSD more than 100 times faster than data moving to and from a hard disk.

These SSDs offer a sustained read rate of 67 megabytes (MB) per second and a random read rate of 7,000 inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) for a 512-byte transfer. As a result, notebooks equipped with a 2.5-inch SanDisk SSD can boot Microsoft Windows Vista Enterprise in as little as 30 seconds and access files at an average speed of 0.11 milliseconds. For comparison, a notebook using a hard disk requires an average 48 seconds to boot and an average 17 milliseconds to access files.

Low power consumption is also a benefit of using SSD technology. Compared to a typical hard disk drive, which consumes 1.9 watts during active operation, SanDisk SSDs consume 1.0 watt (0.5 watts for 1.8") while active and as little as 0.4 watts (0.2 watts for 1.8") while idle.

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