You may be forgiven for thinking that you are seeing double at the SanDisk booth at Computex... double the storage that is. The company has just announced that it has doubled the capacity of its SSD solutions and thrown in a performance upgrade for good measure, too. The two new flavors will come in various compact form factors with the G4 running up to 256GB and the P4 to 128GB.
SanDisk's advanced 32-nanometer multi-level cell process technology gives high storage capacity in a small form factor. It features in both the G4 series and P4 series SSDs currently on show at the company's booth in Taipei. As well as increasing available storage capacity, SanDisk is offering device manufacturers the option to specify customized form factors for greater freedom and flexibility in device design.
The G4 series will be available in capacities ranging from 64GB to 256GB, and have a sequential read speed of 220MB per second with a write speed of 160MB per second. The SSD uses a proprietary page-based flash management algorithm called ExtremeFFS that significantly increases random write speeds and efficiency, leading to better performance over an extended period of time. SanDisk says that its 256GB drive is capable of having 160TB of data written to it over about ten years of use, based on typical user activity of around 4GB per day.
The company's Jeff Janukowicz noted, "Solid state drives like the SanDisk SSD G4 that optimize around actual usage scenarios and device endurance, as opposed to sufficing solely on device level metrics, should provide a better indication of real world performance."
Having dimension of just 1.05 x 1.18 x 0.13 inches, SanDisk's smallest SATA form factor P4 series is naturally geared towards emerging tablet and handheld mobile device markets. The successor to the pSSD series, storage capacities from 8GB to 128GB are offered with nCache acceleration technology giving burst random 4KB performance of up to 600 IOPS.
"We designed our new SSDs with long-term consumer usage in mind. Our drives offer faster boot times and improved system responsiveness while maintaining our uncompromising reliability standards" said senior director of marketing Doron Myersdorf. "In addition, the drives utilize our Adaptive Flash Management (AFM) technology, which enables them to bridge the gap between demanding market requirements and increasingly challenging raw NAND flash characteristics."
SanDisk has said that the new SSDs are expected to go into high volume production later in the year and will likely be aimed at top tier device manufacturers.