Digital Home Thoughts: SanDisk U100 and i100 SSDs: Smaller, Faster, Higher Capacity

"SanDisk has been pumping out press releases all day thanks to Computex-mania, so we shuffled past its stall to see what all the fuss is about. The biggest news is the U100 range of tiny SSDs for ultraportables, which crank data in and out at twice the speed of SanDisk's previous generation P4 drives. We're talking 450MB/s reads and 340MB/s writes thanks to the latest SATA III interface, plus a max capacity of 256GB -- specs which have already enticed ASUS to use the U100 in its lightweight UX-series notebooks."

Technology marches oh so quickly on. Amazing, the size, capacity and performance (6Gbit/sec) of these newest SATA-III SSDs. The U100 is destined for ultraportable laptops, with 256GB (max), and the smaller footprint i100 appears to be headed for tablets, and will max out at 128GB. The devices offer similar read speeds, but the i100 offers "only" 160MB/sec write speeds, or slightly less than half the speed of the U100. Still, 128GB in a tablet would be great, especially when we start to see this storage capacity and performance coupled with upcoming quad-core (or more) processors. Volume production is scheduled for Q3 2011. Prices were not even hinted-at.