Pricing for solid state drives has come down considerably in recent years, making it more affordable than ever to swap in these faster drives in place of more conventional spinning platters. Even so, gigabyte for gigabyte, regular hard disk drives are still cheaper when you want to have the same kind of capacity. That might soon be changing with the upcoming launch of the SanDisk Z400s series of SSDs.
Set to be available in mSATA, 2.5-inch SATA and M.2 (2242 and 2280) configurations, the SanDisk Z400s SSD series is said to provide 20 times faster performance than an equivalent 5400rpm 2.5-inch SATA hard drive, while consuming just 1/20th of the power by comparison. As an SSD, it’s also supposed to be five times more reliable too. All said, you’re getting sequential read and write speeds of 549MB/s and 330MB/s, respectively.
That’s perfectly respectable, but perhaps more importantly, SanDisk is saying that these SSDs will be as affordable as HDDs with capacities ranging from 32GB to 256GB. That’s the good news. The not as good news is that the Z400s is currently being targeted at embedded applications like digital signage and not necessarily for regular consumer products like laptop upgrades. This may be all well and good, seeing how SSDs need to be used on a regular basis if you don’t want to lose all your data. In the case of embedded applications, the SSD is running pretty much around the clock.
And while SanDisk has indicated that the Z400s will be as affordable as hard drives, the company hasn’t come forward with exact pricing yet. In the meantime, just peep their YouTube video for more glory shots of the new SSD.
https://youtu.be/zaGIcomSP9Q
Via BGR