David Flynn12 January 2009, 4:00 PM
New G3 solid state disks ‘spin’ equivalent to a 40,000rpm hard drive but at prices that’ll keep your budget from spiralling into a nosedive.
After all the techno-tease of high-performance solid state drives which are faster, quieter, more robust and better for battery life – but then hit you up for
big bucks, like a bad date ordering the Moet & lobster – we’re starting to see premium SSDs work their down in price.
SanDisk’s new G3 SSDs start at 60GB for just US$150 – that’d be around A$250 by the time you add GST, or $300 if SanDisk wants to milk the Australian market (which we sort of expect it will). US$249 gets you 120GB, or US$499 for a whopping 240GB.
Okay, there’s still a bit of ouch factor there, but SanDisk rates the G3 (which stands for ‘third generation’) as being equivalent to a spin speed of 40,000rpm, with 200MB/s sequential reads and 140MB/s sequential writes. Which is more than five times faster than a 7,200rpm platter, as well as doubling the speed of last year’s SSD offerings.
The drives are due mid-year and will be available in both 1.8 inch and 2.5 inch form factors with a SATA-II interface. The 2.5 inch units will also ship with a PATA interface so they’ll make a natty drop-in replacement for your current hard disk.
Life expectancy of the G3 series is estimated at 100 years of typical usage, so if every child is issued an SSD at birth it’ll still be good enough for recording their last will and testament in HD video (which the grandkids will ignore before tossing that oh-so-small and oh-so-slow drive into the trash, as by that time it’ll be today’s equivalent of a 5.25 inch floppy).
More amusing is SanDisk’s new SSD optimisation algorithm, which it calls ExtremeFFS. We suggest that no technology company should put the letters ‘FFS’ in any bit of jargon, and we salute Steve Ballmer for giving the nod to .NET Framework instead of ‘Windows Technology Framework’.