Responding to the mobile computing world’s ever-increasing need for more storage in less space, SanDisk has come up with the iSSD, or Integrated Solid State Drive.
Designed to be soldered directly onto the motherboard of a smartphone or tablet computer, iSSDs will initially be available in sizes from 1GB to 64GB, all crammed into a space of 16mm x 20mm x 1.85mm and weighing less than one gram. They’ll offer 160MB/sec sequential read and 100MB/sec sequential write speeds across a standard SATA interface, according to SanDisk’s internal testing; it’ll be pretty interesting to see test results from others as people get their hands on systems built using them.
Early samples are now available for OEMs to evaluate, so hopefully it won’t be long before products using them hit retail. There’s no pricing information available at present, save that the exact prices manufacturers pay depends on how many they order. Exactly what you’d expect in other words.
(Via Engadget)
This is actually a very fast read/write speed, so it should also speed up portable devices in addition to adding capacity.
John P.
Do you think this means we can finally have our OS’s onboard and running from a chip and still use our hard drives for everything else?
It hasn’t really been implimented yet in a consumer fashion. If it’s relatively affordable I’d love to see this built into Desktops so we can all have the 30second bootups!
It certainly becomes a possibility. Whether that’s what we’ll get depends on whether manufacturers implement it. It doesn’t have to be on the board though, you could get an expansion card with it.
I suspect if they were to make use of the tech for desktops they’d take advantage of the small size to pack a lot more into the same form factors that are standard, though.
@Steve, we’ll eventually get this either through a embedded chip like this or an installed mSATA card, but combined with the upcoming Pheonix Instant Boot BIOS we can see boot times down to a mere 10 seconds or less…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9E_Qri8b2E
While portable devices should see more either always on and/or instant on becoming the norm by the end of next year…
Nobody seems to be reading this part (including Cali for GeekBeat.TV #25)
“soldered directly onto the motherboard”
You aren’t going to be buying them separately.
@John, almost every new 2.5″ SSD is much faster than this (typically around 200/250 for MLC).
@Steve, yes, putting the OS on this and then adding a mechanical drive for storage is probably the only thing this will be used for. Likely, it will be mainly on OEM boards so that manufacturers can save cost.
@James, people have been saying “under 10 second boot” for at least 10 years. There is already an open source BIOS/Linux that boots faster than this. http://www.coreboot.org/
Most of the bootup time is from bloated software people use though. I recently got someone’s Vista boot time from 3 minutes down to 30 seconds just by uninstalling software he didn’t use, opening up regedit and cleaning out his boot sequence. My Vista and 7 machines actually boot faster than Ubuntu (but that’s why I use Debian for Linux, Ubuntu is easy for beginners but its not a good distro)
All in all, this doesn’t seem much more impressive than Mini PCI-Express SSDs. Just a little smaller but probably used in the same places.
They’re doing a review of one of these on http://bit.ly/aAVFPm