SanDisk G3 SSD Memory Blows Away Hard Drives' Performance

SanDisk today unveiled its third-generation family of solid-state drives (SSDs). Using multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory technology, SanDisk's G3 Series of SSD memory has incredible performance benchmarks. The G3 SSDs are more than five times faster than the fastest 7,200 RPM hard disk drives and more than twice as fast as SSDs shipping in 2008, clocking in at 40,000 RPM and anticipated sequential performance of 200MB/s read and 140MB/s write. Even the fastest hard drives I've seen to date, which I have installed on serveral servers at TMC, currently max out at 15,000 RPM.

They were designed as drop-in replacements for hard-disk drives (HDDs) in notebook PCs, the initial members in the SanDisk G3 family are SSD C25-G3 and SSD C18-G3 in the standard 2.5" and 1.8" form factors, respectively, each available with a SATA-II interface. Available in capacities of 60, 120 and 240GB*, the unit MSRPs are $149, $249 and $499, respectively. The G3 SSDs provide a Long-term Data Endurance (LDE) of 160 terabytes written (TBW) for the 240GB version, sufficient for over 100 years of typical user usage. Using such fast memory instead of a hard drive in a netbook, laptop, or even PC desktop should make these computers nearly instantly boot. Sweet!

According to Sandisk: Three key features developed by SanDisk enable this new design: a new SSD algorithm called ExtremeFFSTM allows random write performance to potentially improve by as much as 100 times over conventional algorithms; reliable 43nm multi-level cell (MLC) all bit-line (ABL) NAND flash; and SanDisk's new SSD controller, which ties together the NAND and the algorithm.

The SanDisk G3 SSDs will be available in mid 2009, in a 2.5" PATA configuration. Now we just need SSD RAID5 or SSD RAID10 using multiple SSD cards and then we can finally say goodbye to current expensive RAID5/10 server configurations that require expensive hard drives and RAID controllers! Wow, servers would also be blazingly fast using multiple SSD cards working in parallel in a RAID configuration.