SanDisk Corporation unveiled its third-generation family of solid-state drives (SSDs), which uses multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory technology.
The company says SanDisk’s G3 Series establishes new benchmarks in performance and price-performance in the SSD industry.
Designed as drop-in replacements for hard-disk drives (HDDs) in notebook PCs, the initial members in the SanDisk G3 family are SSD C25-G3 and SSD C18-G3 in the standard 2.5” and 1.8” form factors, respectively, each available with a SATA-II interface. Available in capacities of 60, 120 and 240GB, the unit MSRPs are US$149, US$249 and US$499, respectively.
The G3 SSDs are more than five times faster than the fastest 7,200 RPM HDDs and more than twice as fast as SSDs shipping in 2008, with an anticipated sequential performance of 200MB/s read and 140MB/s write.
These new models provide a Long-term Data Endurance (LDE) of 160 terabytes written (TBW) for the 240GB version, sufficient for over 100 years of typical user usage.
“SanDisk’s G3 SSD has met the demand of a 120GB SSD at less than $250 with an exceptional user experience,” said Rich Heye, sr. vp and general manager, Solid State Drives (SSD) business unit, SanDisk. “Three key features developed by SanDisk enable this new design: a new SSD algorithm called ExtremeFFSTM allows random write performance to potentially improve by as much as 100 times over conventional algorithms; reliable 43nm multi-level cell (MLC) all bit-line (ABL) NAND flash; and SanDisk’s new SSD controller, which ties together the NAND and the algorithm.”
The SanDisk G3 SSDs will be available to the market in mid 2009, in a 2.5” PATA configuration. In addition, the SanDisk G3 SSDs will be available on sandisk.com for do-it-yourself (DIY) enthusiasts. “
