SanDisk Aims Flash Drive At Notebooks

The undisclosed but admittedly steep price tag on the SanDisk flash drive will keep its uptake very limited. But the announcement marks the beginning of a developing market many are watching closely.

Flash has already replaced hard disk drives in many high volume MP3 players. That fact caught the industry's attention when Apple announced its flash-based iPod Nano and stopped producing its hard drive-based iPod Mini.

SanDisk's move is a sign some foresee a similar shift could happen for a segment of the notebook market. In a nod to that possibility, market watcher International Data Corp. (IDC; Framingham, Mass.) is about to hire its first analyst to focus on flash drives.

"All the flash and hard drive companies are interested in this," said John Rydning, a hard disk analyst for IDC who covers flash drives on a part-time basis. "It may take time for the [flash-drive] market to develop but we want to get into this now," Rydning said.

More flash competitors and the rise of multi-level flash are helping accelerate the fall of flash prices. Today, flash and hard disk prices are similar for products at about 8 Gbytes. The two were at rough parity at 2 Gbytes just 18 months ago.

SanDisk did not announce pricing for its 32 Gbyte, 1.8-inch flash drive, but did say end users would pay a premium on the resulting notebook of about $600. The typical notebook uses an 80 Gbyte, 2.5-inch drive that costs a PC maker about $60.

"Today you are paying a pretty high premium for the benefits of flash in a notebook," said Rydning. Less than five percent of today's notebooks use the small 1.8-inch drives, he added.

SanDisk doesn't expect a major market for its notebook flash drives in 2007. But the company is preparing the way to take a larger slice of the pie.

Later this year, SanDisk plans to roll out 64 and perhaps 128 Gbyte drives as well as models at lower costs and in the more traditional 2.5-inch form factor. The initial drive uses a parallel ATA interface and single bit per cell flash. Future models will use serial ATA and SanDisk's two-bit per cell flash that could lower costs "a few tens of percentage points," a SanDisk spokesman said.

SanDisk has been selling for several years high-priced flash drives at capacities up to 320 Gbytes for use as rugged data recorders in military and aerospace applications. The company is working in the labs on technologies that could put three or even four memory bits on a cell in the future.

SanDisk announced no OEM design wins for the notebook drive, but said it should have design wins to announce by June. The first product ships before April.

Flash drives provide higher performance, use less power and are more rugged than rotating disk storage. However there is some concern they may wear out sooner than hard drives.

Hard disks typically last about five years based on failures of their mechanical parts. Flash chips could wear out sooner based on limited numbers of read/write cycles.