SanDisk introduced a 32-gigabyte, 1.8-inch solid state drive (SSD) as a drop-in replacement for the standard mechanical hard disk drive.

Initially aimed at enterprise users as the first step toward mass consumer adoption, SanDisk SSD offers field-proven durability to keep mobile PCs working in the toughest of conditions and improves the overall user experience.

The declining cost of NAND flash memory has made SSD a viable and economically attractive alternative to existing technologies in a wider variety of applications, including mobile PCs aimed at enterprise and consumer users.

“This is an important milestone for SanDisk in our relentless quest to create new large-scale markets for flash storage solutions for consumers in the personal computing space,” said Eli Harari, SanDisk CEO. “The 32-gigabyte SSD that we are announcing today represents the fifth generation of flash-based solid state drives developed by msystems, which we recently acquired. The 32GB SSD has been made commercially viable through SanDisk’s technology leadership coupled with msystems’ tremendous experience and IP, which are captured in the high-performance, low-cost system controllers that distinguish this product.

It is projected that inclusion of the SanDisk 32GB SSD in a notebook PC could increase the end-user price by around $600 in the first half of 2007, he added.

Using NAND flash enhanced by SanDisk’s patented TrueFFS flash management technology, SanDisk SSD delivers two million hours mean time between failures (MTBF). With no moving parts, it does not need to spin into action or seek files in the way that conventional hard disk drives do.

The SanDisk SSD announced today achieves a sustained read rate of 62 MB/s and a random read rate of 7,000 inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) for a 512-byte transfer – more than 100 times faster than most hard disk drives. Taking advantage of this performance, a laptop PC equipped with SanDisk SSD can boot Microsoft Windows Vista Enterprise in 35 seconds. It also can achieve an average file access rate of 0.12 milliseconds, compared with 55 seconds and 19 milliseconds, respectively, for a laptop PC with a hard disk drive.

SanDisk SSD power consumption rate is 0.4 watt during active operation; hard disk drives consume 1.0 watt.

SanDisk SSD 1.8-inch 32GB solid state drive is now available for original equipment manufacturers. It is the first in a range of solutions that SanDisk will be offering to bring flash to the mainstream mobile PC market.