Flash vendor SanDisk is shipping a 32GB, ATA-interfaced, solid-state drive (SSD) aimed at enterprise notebooks. The 1.8-inch SSD UATA 5000 can radically improve storage performance and reliability, while adding around $600 to retail costs, the company claims.

(Click for larger view of SanDisk SSD)

SanDisk describes its SSD as a fifth-generation flash disk design from flash memory pioneer Msystems, which SanDisk acquired last summer. Msystems's earlier “DiskOnChip” products were priced prohibitively for the consumer market, but have proved popular in aerospace, defense, medical, and other reliability-oriented embedded applications, due largely to their ruggedness.

Like Msystems's earlier flash storage products, the new ATA SSD uses the company's patented TrueFFS filesystem, which recently gained open source Linux drivers, after wear-leveling algorithms and other sensitive IP were migrated from the device driver level to microcode running on ARM7 microcontrollers embedded within the devices. In the case of ATA drives, such as the newly announced SSD UATA 5000, no special drivers should be required, as the drive can be expected to behave identically to standard rotating magnetic media ATA drives, from a functional perspective.

Claimed performance advantages

SanDisk claims that a Dell D420 notebook can boot Microsoft Windows Vista in 35 seconds, instead of 55 seconds, when equipped with its SSD instead of a normal hard drive. However, a 1.8-inch, 4200 rpm hard drive was used in the comparison, rather than the larger, faster 2.5-inch drives found in most modern laptops.

Still, claimed read performance is impressive: 62MB/second for sustained reads, and 7,000 IOPS (input/outputs per second) for a 512MB file — roughly 100 times the stats of typical hard drives, SanDisk claims.

Another touted benefit is faster file access times — a sum of seek time and access latency. SanDisk says it measured access times as low as 0.12ms for the SSD, compared to 19ms for the 1.8-inch, 4200 rpm hard drive.

Lower power consumption is yet another touted benefit. The new SSD draws 0.4 Watts during write operations, compared to 1.0 Watt for hard drives, according to SanDisk.

The SSD's most appealing advantage over traditional rotating magnetic storage, however, is probably reliability. Without moving parts, SSD ATA drives should prove to be more rugged. SanDisk claims that the SSD's MTBF (mean time between failure) to be two million hours — or about 228.3 years. This, by the way, represents a substantial improvement over early flash media performance, an improvement that can be attributed to exotic wear-leveling and other reliability-enhancing algorithms implemented by the company's TFFS firmware. (Flash memory cells support a limited number of re-write cycles.)

SanDisk's radical performance claims notwithstanding, NAND flash in general does suffer from a few undesirable performance characteristics, compared to traditional hard drives. For example, data can only be erased in fairly large segments — meaning that especially small write operations could take longer and use more energy. Thus, it will be interesting to see how the SSD might fare against a high-performance 2.5-inch, 7200rpm laptop drive in independent lab testing.

Eli Harari, SanDisk CEO, stated, “The 32GB SSD has been made commercially viable through SanDisk's technology leadership coupled with Msystems' tremendous experience and IP. We expect to see increasing adoption as we continue to reduce the cost of flash memory.”

Robert Gray, IDC analyst, noted that “there has been a huge increase in demand for NAND flash memory over the past few years from consumer devices such as digital cameras, MP3 players and mobile phones. There are dramatically higher bit capacities and lower prices, so the technology is now well positioned to be the foundation for new generations of potentially disruptive solid state drives.”

Availability

SanDisk says the SSD 1.8-inch SSD UATA 5000 32GB drive is now available for OEMs (original equipment manufacturers). It is the first in a planned range of flash-based storage products for the mainstream PC market, according to the company.

SanDisk's GM of embedded products, Amos Marom, will discuss the new SSD at the Storage Visions 2007 event in Las Vegas next week.

 
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