Seems like every storage vendor has been getting into the solid-state drive (SSD) market for a while now, but SanDisk has been absent—which was noticeable considering how much of its business is built around flash memory. Well, no more: SanDisk has announced its G3 Solid State Drives are now available to retailers in North America and Europe. The drives are aimed as drop-in replacements for 7,200 RPM hard drives—and they’re initially available in 60 GB and 120 GB capacities.
“Our rugged drive enables a superior customer experience by delivering extended endurance and fast performance in a resilient SSD design,” said SanDisk retail product marketing VP Eric Bone, in a statement. “SanDisk believes in an uncompromising development approach which insists that an SSD’s long term reliability and durability are just as important as its overall speed.”
The SanDisk G3 SSDs runs on a 3Gb/s SATA interface and offers read speeds of up to 220 MB/s and write speeds up to 120 MB/s. Under the case, the drives use a flash management system called ExtremeFFS that can speed up random write performance and extend the lifetime of the SSD drives—SanDisk is warranting the drives for 10 years, but flash memory only supports a limited number of writes: the storage management software essentially works to spread those around the drive so there are no frequently-used areas that wear out first. SanDisk says the drives should support having at least 80 terabytes of data written to them in their lifetimes.
The Drive are Windows 7-certified (and supports TRIM) and work with Mac OS X Snow Leopard as well; users can also use the drives with Windows XP/Vista and Linux.
The G3s should be available shortly from leading retailers; the 60 GB version carries a suggested price of $229.99, while the 120 GB version has a suggested price of $399.99.
