SanDisk Corporation is bringing to the market a 32 gigabyte (GB), 1.8-inch solid state drive (SSD) as a replacement for the standard mechanical hard disk drive. The new drive is initially aimed at enterprise users as the first step toward mass consumer adoption, according to the company.

With the declining cost of NAND flash memory SanDisk says the SSD is a viable and economically attractive alternative to existing technologies in a wider variety of applications, including mobile PCs aimed at enterprise and consumer users.

It is projected that inclusion of the SanDisk 32GB SSD in a notebook PC could increase the end-user price by around $600 USD in the first half of 2007.

Using NAND flash and SanDisk’s TrueFFS flash management technology, the SanDisk SSD delivers two million hours mean time between failures (MTBF). With no moving parts, it does not need to spin into action or seek files in the way that conventional hard disk drives do. These characteristics make it possible for this class of devices to deliver higher performance when compared with hard disk drives.

The SanDisk SSD achieves a sustained read rate of 62 megabytes (MB) per second and a random read rate of 7,000 inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) for a 512-byte transfer. This is more than 100 times faster than most hard disk drives, according to the company.

People could expect a laptop PC equipped with SanDisk SSD could boot Microsoft Windows Vista Enterprise in as little as 35 seconds. It also can achieve an average file access rate of 0.12 milliseconds, compared with 55 seconds and 19 milliseconds, respectively, for a laptop PC with a hard disk drive.

Another advantage of SanDisk SSD is its extremely low power consumption rate compared to the hard disk drive: 0.4 watt during active operation versus 1.0 watt . This is particularly important to extend the battery life for the benefit of enterprise mobile users.

The 1.8-inch 32GB solid state drive is now available for original equipment manufacturers.