SanDisk targets netbooks with pSSD Flash drives

SanDisk's new pSSD drives use the firm's nCache technology

Storage firm SanDisk has unveiled its next generation of Flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) designed for use in netbooks.

The new pSSD P2 and S2 drives are being showcased at the Computex show in Taipei, and promise to bolster SSD performance while keeping the price competitive.

A recent report from analyst firm IDC predicted that consumer purchases of netbooks will rise from 11.5 million last year to 50 million in 2013, and SanDisk hopes its new drives will help push the case for SSDs in this growing category.

The drives use SanDisk's nCache technology which provides a non-volatile cache of up to 320MB to support bursts of random write commands, thereby helping to reduce the stalling or shuddering often seen in first-generation netbook SSDs.

Furthermore, because nCache is non-volatile, temporary data that has not been committed to the hard drive can be recovered in the event of a power interruption.

"Full-featured operating systems make tremendous demands on the storage device, writing large amounts of data in fast bursts using small random transfer sizes," said Doreet Oren, director of product marketing at SanDisk.

"SanDisk pSSD drives with nCache offer up to 50 times the random write performance of our first generation SSDs, delivering on the SSD promise for netbooks."

SanDisk's engineers have worked closely with Canonical, the creator of the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system, and chip maker ARM to further optimise performance and power consumption when used together, the firm said.

"Our tests have shown SanDisk second-generation pSSDs equipped with nCache performing significantly better than a 5,400rpm hard drive, providing Ubuntu users with the speed and stability that they need," explained Chris Kenyon, director of original equipment manufacturer services at Canonical.

The new drives are available in capacities ranging from 8GB to 64GB. Pricing details were not available at the time of writing, and it is unclear whether the drives will be embedded-only, or sold as standalone units which could be used to upgrade existing netbooks.