SanDisk Flash SSDs for Lowest-Cost PCs

If you don’t really need a lot of capacity or highest performance, then you typically focus on cost. Asus’s EEE PC notebooks or lowest-cost computers are excellent examples, as these need convenient and affordable storage, but do not require large capacities or stellar performance. A few gigabytes are often enough to store an operating system plus the most important user data, which is exactly the market segment SanDisk is after.

SanDisk is showing a new flash memory product line, which is based on a parallel UltraATA interface. Consequently, the new products are named pSSDs. SanDisk says that these were developed for lowest-cost computers, which it refers to as ULCPCs (ultra-low-cost PCs). While performance wasn’t the primary objective, smallest physical dimentions and low power requirements were on top of the list to be suitable for ultra-small computing devices.

The pSSD will be available starting in August at capacities of 4, 8 and 16 GB. First shipments will be at the 16 GB capacity point. The manufacturer says that its drives reach a read throughput performance of 39 MB/s, which is an average value and roughly as fast as a 2-3 year old notebook hard drive. Write operations can be performed at 17 MB/s, which users of lowest-cost solutions should be able to live with.