Those of you with desktops and laptops that still rely on conventional moving part hard drives have probably eyed a solid-state drive and wondered if its worth making the switch, but if you held off, there may have been a good reason.
That reason could be that later on, the technology will be better, so why not wait. Even before this writer was a technology journalist, the same thought process went through his mind before he purchased hardware.
If you have waited for an upgrade of your hard drive to the newer solid-state formats, though, your time might have come as SanDisk preps a new range of SSDs, aimed at bringing faster performance to both laptops and desktops, with power savings for laptop batteries thrown in if you’re upgrading a mobile machine.
The new drives will bring with them write speeds of up to 520MB per second and read speeds just marginally higher at 550MB/s, a speed which translates into around a gigabyte every two seconds, which is a level no conventional moving part hard drive can compete with.
Aside for the blistering speeds, there’s some improvements to SanDisk’s proprietary nCache architecture aimed at improving speed by providing a better map of where the files are on your drive, and one that won’t necessarily corrupt itself if you decide to shut your computer down without taking it through a proper shut down cycle.
It also comes with a 10 year warranty that we’ve confirmed to be a global one, making it so that if the drive fails, within a decade, you should be able to get it replaced. We can’t say the same for your data — sorry, manufacturers can’t cover that — but at least the drive can be dealt with.
“Building off the success of our award-winning SanDisk Extreme II, the new SanDisk Extreme Pro leverages the latest developments in our innovative nCache Pro Technology to enable 24×7, real-world drive performance and responsiveness,” said George Saad, Country Manager for SanDisk in Australia and New Zealand.
“With its ability to deliver consistently fast computing backed by the industry’s first 10-year limited warranty, the Extreme Pro SSD delivers the performance, trusted reliability and value that enthusiasts and professionals expect from SanDisk.”
The obvious possibilities for installing a solid-state drive are upgrades to laptops, which we’ve covered previously in a guide (in case you’re curious and want to try it out), but with more speed inside this drive than previous models, the possibilities for upgrades also extends to gaming consoles, because a super-fast solid-state drive could be a solid upgrade for an Xbox or PlayStation, or even a gaming PC.
Regardless of what you’re upgrading, the drives on offer will now come in three available models, with SanDisk cutting out the 120GB model, with the company’s Leo Huang, Product Manager for Client Storage Solutions, telling us the model was removed because “120 is not enough.”
With no 120GB model, the entry model is now 240GB, which grabs a recommended retail price of $279, with a 480GB and 960GB other options for people keen for more storage fetching $499 and $799 respectively.
July is the expected time frame for these drives, so if you’re keen to try the new drives, you only have to wait a few days before stores receive stock.
