SanDisk Releases P2 and S2 Solid-State Drives for Netbooks

SanDisk, the world's largest flash memory card maker, has begun shipping its next-generation flash memory-based solid-state drives for netbooks, the pSSD P2 and S2 in 8GB, 16GB, 32Gb and 64GB.

Additionally, it is shipping newly packaged 8GB and 16GB SDHC (secure digital high capacity) cards, specifically intended for netbooks.

Eric Bone, SanDisk's vice president of retail product marketing, points to IDC data predicting that consumer netbook purchases will rise from the 11.5 million sold in 2008 to 50 million in 2013, and says that with the netbook's popularity has come a race to drive down prices, particularly as carriers, or mobile network operators (MNOs), begin selling them with data service plans.

"The MNOs of the U.S. tend to be dictators, telling hardware suppliers how they want things done," Bone told eWEEK. "From a hardware perspective, every dollar counts."

Bone said he has seen product breakdowns in which storage can account for as much as 25 percent of a netbook's cost, though flash memory and SSDs are changing that, along with improving durability, performance and power consumption.

"When you bought your first notebook, you associated a certain amount of value to it because you probably spent $1,500 on it," he said. "But netbooks have become lifestyle products, fashion, and they get thrown into purses or bags. ... Some notebooks have accelerometers built into them, but they can never overcome the fact that there are moving parts involved."

The new SanDisk pSSD P2 and S2 SSDs feature SanDisk's nCache technology, a nonvolatile write cache capable of supporting burst performance up to fives times the steady-state vRPM2 (virtual revolutions per minute). P2 and S2 offer 9,000 vRPM and a nonvolatile cache of up to 320MB.

According to SanDisk, the pSSD drives with nCache offer up to 50 times the random write performance of its first-generation SSDs.

Netbook owners can also extend the original storage capabilities of their devices with the newly packaged 8GB and 16GB SDHC cards, which will retail for $39.99 and $79.99, respectively.

Major retailers will stock the new cards alongside their netbook offerings, instead of in the camera aisle, which is the point, said Bone.

"We want people to associate the SD cards with more than cameras."