SanDisk Announces Two New Solid State Drives

Tweet

The folks out at SanDisk are taking advantage of the hard drive shortages to come at us with a whole new alternative, specifically, the solid state drive. And they’re showing off a couple of very different items for those of you who want to try a little something different in the way you store your data, the Extreme SSD and the X100 solid state drive.

The Extreme SSD is geared toward the power user, as you’d likely expect from most any device with the word “extreme” contained right in the title. Though based on the spec list, they won’t just be putting that word in there because it looks pretty. No, quite the contrary–the 2.5 inch solid state drive will use a 6 GB/s SATA connection to yield read speeds of fully 550 MB/s and write speeds around 520 MB/s. You’ll be able to pick this one up for yourself in your choice of two sizes: the 120 gig model will set you back $189.99, and the 240 gig version will cost $399.99. Meanwhile, if you’re willing to wait a while for bigger storage and don’t mind an accompanying bigger price tag, there’s set to be a 480 gig version to follow later on this year, if you’re willing to pay $749.99 for it, that is.

Meanwhile, the X100 is geared more toward PC manufacturers, and is set to fit inside the slimmed-down chassis of ultrabooks. It’s set to offer up somewhat slower read and write speeds–500 MB/s and 420 MB/s, respectively-than the Extreme SSD, and we can’t even do a proper price comparison as one wasn’t announced. Still though, you’re likely to see these show up in more ultrabooks as the line starts gaining popularity against its thicker laptop cousins.

Still though, the primary issues are well in evidence with either of these. While even at the inflated prices we’re paying these days for hard drives in light of the flooding in Thailand, we’re still getting a much better value than the SSD can drum up on a pure dollars to storage ratio. Admittedly there are benefits to solid state drives in speed and data protection (in a physical sense, really–fewer moving parts mean that the system is less likely overall to fail), but still, from a straight value perspective, hard drives are still better off.

But what do you guys think here? Anyone interested in the Extreme SSD? Or do you figure that this one will be largely ignored in favor of the much less expensive offerings in the hard drive market? No matter what you think, head on down to the comments section below and tell us just what’s on your mind!