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

The company said that SanDisk SSD, which initially aimed at enterprise users as the first step towards mass consumer adoption, offers field-proven durability to keep mobile PCs working in the toughest of conditions, and improves the overall user experience.

Talking about the product, Eli Harari, Chief Executive Officer of SanDisk, said, "The 32GB SSD that we are announcing today represents the fifth generation of flash-based solid state drives developed by msystems, which we recently acquired. The 32GB SSD has been made commercially viable through SanDisk's technology leadership coupled with msystems' tremendous experience and IP, which are captured in the high-performance, low-cost system controllers that distinguish this product."

"Once we begin shipping the 32GB SSD for notebook PCs, we expect to see its increasing adoption in the coming years, as we continue to reduce the cost of flash memory. When these SSD devices become more affordable, we expect that their superior features over rotating disk drives will create a new consumer category for our retail sales channels worldwide," Harari said.

Using NAND flash enhanced by SanDisk's patented TrueFFS flash management technology, SanDisk SSD delivers two million hours mean time between failures (MTBF). Besides, it 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 transfer, which is more than 100 times faster than most hard disk drives.

Moreover, a laptop PC equipped with SanDisk SSD can boot Microsoft Windows Vista Enterprise in as little as 35 seconds. It can also 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 drive.

Another advantage of SanDisk SSD is its extremely low power consumption rate compared to the hard disk drive that is 0.4 watt during active operation as compared to 1.0 watt. These results enable new operating systems, such as Microsoft Vista, to provide mobile PC users with a superior overall system experience.

Meanwhile, SanDisk SSD 1.8-inch 32GB solid-state drive is now available for original equipment manufacturers. The company also projects that inclusion of the SanDisk 32GB SSD in a notebook PC could increase the end-user price by around $600 (Rs 27,000 approx) in the first half of 2007.