SanDisk dropped a little bomb on the Consumer Electronics Show on Thursday: a solid state flash drive for netbooks and notebooks that promise to make our portable computing experience faster, more reliable and more resilient.
"We think that this is a major inflection point," said SanDisk chairman and CEO Eli Harari. We agree. To date, solid state drives have (SSDs) have been largely confined to low-capacity netbooks. But SanDisk’s G3 SSDs have enough capacity to be used in full-fledged notebooks as well — 60GB ($149), 120GB ($249) or 240GB ($499). At those prices, many of us will switch to solid state notebooks that boot in seconds.
Richard Heye (right), the head of SanDisk’s SSD division, said the main three advantages are increased reliability because SSDs have no moving parts and are much harder to break than conventional drives; performance, because these solid state drives can send data to your processor five times faster than a 7,200 RPM disk drive; and longevity, because these drives will apparently work for ten years without failing.
If IT managers can increase the life of their average employee notebook
from three years to four, Heye said, the savings will be significant. CIOs surveyed by SanDisk said they would be willing to pay a 10 to 20
percent premium for SSD notebooks.
However, we didn’t agree with Heye’s point that the 240GB limit of the
line is a selling point. Heye claims IT managers don’t want
employees walking around with massive amounts of data, so they prefer that employees be restricted to lower capacity
machines to limit the amount of data they can potentially lose. (Sure,
buddy… When SanDisk releases a terabyte SSD, you can bet they won’t tout its high capacity as a
disadvantage.)
SanDisk predicts strong growth for these drives — 117 percent annually
for the next four to five years — in part, it says, because its SSDs
are faster than those of the competition due to the company’s 20+ years
of experience with flash memory.
The company also announced two new components of its slotMusic
campaign: slotRadio cards and the slotRadio Player, slated for an early Q2 release.
SlotRadio cards give users 1,000 songs for $40 in a variety of genres
or in a single genre, from all four major labels, all of which were
hand-picked and come presorted into playlists. These microSD cards can
be played on any SanDisk Sansa MP3 player or cellphone with the slot —
or on the new slotRadio Player — a $99 device that comes with a thousand-song slotRadio card. Artist-specific versions for Akon and other artists will also be available pre-stocked with songs and other data.
Akon took the stage with Daniel
Schreiber, senior vice president of the company’s AV and emerging
businesses division to explain the allure of this
non-techie-friendly approach: no wires, computers,
software or internet. (Even if this doesn’t sound alluring, it could mean less tech support will be required on your end when someone in your family can’t figure out their iPod.)
Post a Comment