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Flash memory storage solutions specialist SanDisk introduced the Ultra solid-state drive for the retail market. The new SSD is designed to extend the life of desktop and notebook PCs and offer greater performance, durability and power efficiency than a hard-disk drive. The drive comes in 60, 120 and 240GB capacities carrying prices of $129.99, $219.99 and $449.99, respectively. Consumers in the United States can order the drive now from online retailers, according to a company release.
The new SSD features faster performance with the drive’s up to 280MB per second sequential read and 270MB per second sequential write speeds, which deliver fast data-transfer rates of up to 3G bps random speeds, low power consumption to extend battery life, no moving parts to offer silent operation and long-term reliability, with a mean time between failures of up to 1,000,000 hours.
“Replacing a computer’s hard-disk drive with the SanDisk Ultra SSD is more cost effective than buying a new PC,” said Kent Perry, director of product marketing for SanDisk. “Our new SSD delivers greater speed and reliability than a hard-disk drive,” and its price is affordable, he said.
In June the company expanded its Lightning EFD (Enterprise Flash Drive) family with six 2.5-inch 6Gbps SAS (serial-attached SCSI) models. The Lightning products are part of the new ESS (Enterprise Storage Solutions) division that SanDisk created following its recent acquisition of Pliant Technology.
The drives include three SLC (single-level cell) flash drives with capacities of 100, 200 and 400GB; and three MLC (multi-level cell) flash drives with capacities of 200, 400 and 800GB. The new drives extend SanDisk’s offerings for products with enhanced EFD performance, performance predictability and reliability. SanDisk noted that HP has qualified and integrated the new Lightning 6Gb SAS drives into its HP Qualified storage drive offerings.
The drives include a full duplex, fully independent, dual-port SAS interface, wide-port support for integrators needing to aggregate bandwidth from both SAS ports, a write cache-less design, eliminating data loss on power interruptions and end-to-end data protection and reliability features, including background Patrol Read and Memory Reclaim, extended ECC, triple-redundant ECC-protected metadata, and support for the T10 Data Integrity Field standard.