SanDisk today introduced a 32-gigabyte (GB), 1.8-inch solid state drive (SSD) as a drop-in replacement for the standard mechanical hard disk drive.

Initially aimed at enterprise users as the first step toward mass consumer adoption, SanDisk SSD offers field-proven durability to keep mobile PCs working in the toughest of conditions and improves the overall user experience.

Previously, large capacity flash-based drives had been used primarily by the military, aerospace and telecom industries, which demanded high performance and reliability under challenging environmental conditions. But now the declining cost of NAND flash memory has made SSD a viable and economically attractive alternative to existing technologies in a wider variety of applications, including mobile PCs aimed at enterprise and consumer users.

Using NAND flash enhanced by SanDisk?s patented TrueFFS flash management technology, SanDisk SSD delivers two million hours mean time between failures (MTBF). With no moving parts, it does not need to spin into action or seek files in the way that conventional hard disk drives do. These characteristics, combined with SanDisk's advanced flash management technology, make it possible for SanDisk SSD to deliver excellent performance compared with hard disk drives and competing solid state drives.

The SanDisk SSD announced today achieves a sustained read rate of 62 megabytes (MB) per second and a random read rate of 7,000 inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) for a 512-byte transferiii ? more than 100 times faster than most hard disk drives. Taking advantage of this performance, a laptop PC equipped with SanDisk SSD can boot Microsoft Windows Vista Enterprise in as little as 35 seconds. It also can achieve an average file access rate of 0.12 milliseconds, compared with 55 seconds and 19 milliseconds, respectively, for a laptop PC with a hard disk drivev.

Another advantage of SanDisk SSD is its low power consumption rate compared to the hard disk drive: 0.4 watt during active operation versus 1.0 watt . This is particularly important to extend the battery life for the benefit of enterprise road warriors.

SanDisk SSD 1.8-inch 32GB solid state drive is now available for original equipment manufacturers. It is the first in a range of solutions that SanDisk will be offering to bring flash to the mainstream mobile PC market.

Amos Marom, vice president and general manager of the embedded division at SanDisk, is scheduled to deliver a presentation at Storage Visions 2007 on Jan. 7 at 11:45 a.m. at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas.