Event Coverage

CeBIT Hannover 2007 (Part 6)

By Vijay Anand - 22 Mar 2007

SanDisk's Booth

SanDisk's Booth

 Quite a bit of SanDisk's booth was catered to their lifestyle series - their Sansa portable media players.

 New to their Sansa series is this PMP, the Sansa View. Features include a 4-inch widescreen display, SD & SDHC memory card slot, A/V output to TV, removable and rechargeable LiPolymer battery and is rated for 4 hours of continuous video playback or up to 10 hours of audio playback.

 Just recently announced earlier this month, SanDisk showcases these new high speed, high capacity memory cards - the SanDisk Extreme III 4GB SDHC and the The SanDisk Extreme III 4GB Memory Stock PRO Duo. They have a sequential read/write speed of 20MB/s and 18MB/s respectively. Both will be available April and will cost US$140 and US$180 respectively. The SanDisk Extreme III 4GB SDHC will even be bundled with a MicroMate SDHC reader as seen in the photo.

 Just in time for CeBIT, SanDisk broadened its solid state drive (SSD) line-up with a 32GB 2.5-inch SATA model (the left unit in this picture). This came in just two months after the introduction of the 1.8-inch SSD for ultra portable notebooks (the right unit in this photo). Primary benefit is of course higher reliability as there is no moving parts, thereby resulting in six times higher the MTBF figures. High performance with a sustained read rate of 67MB per second and random read rate of 7,000 input/output per second (IOPS) for a 512-byte transfer is achievable. And last but not least, higher power efficiency than HDDs and they operate cooler and quieter than HDDs.

  The 2.5-inch SanDisk SSD is a direct drop-in solution for notebooks and as demoed here on a Dell Latitude D420, it can boot Windows Vista Enterprise in as little as 30 seconds (compared to an average of 48 seconds for hard disk-based notebooks). According to SanDisk, the 32GB, 2.5-inch SSD is now available to computer vendors at US$350 for large volume orders. While SSD sounds like a great alternative, capacity offerings aren't quite ideal - there's not a whole lot of storage with 32GB considering how Vista guzzles a sizable portion of that. At minimum something about twice that size is required, but it looks to become a reality soon given the progress made.

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