By Chris Mellor
8th January 2009 16:50 GMT

SanDisk has unveiled faster notebook flash SSDs using its ExtremeFFS technology and with a new controller, a day after attacking the netbook market. This is what SanDisk hope will start making inroads into notebook hard drive displacement. The SATA 7000 family consists of C25-G3 (third generation 2.5-inch form factor) and C18-G3 (third generation 1.8-inch form factor) drives with 60, 120 or 240GB capacities.

They use the SATA II (3Gbit/s interface) and are designed as drop-in replacements for existing notebook hard disk drives HDDs). Rich Heye, SAnDisk's SVP and general manager for its SSD business unit, said: "Three key features developed by SanDisk enable this new design: a new SSD algorithm called ExtremeFFS allows random write performance to potentially improve by as much as 100 times over conventional algorithms; reliable 43nm multi-level cell (MLC) all bit-line (ABL) NAND flash; and SanDisk's new SSD controller, which ties together the NAND and the algorithm."

SanDisk doesn't say whether this is 2-bit or 3-bit MLC. We have been waiting for a mysterious SanDisk third flash ingredient and so, presumably, here it is, the new controller. SanDisk says these SSDs are more than five times faster than the fastest 7,200rpm HDDs and more than twice as fast as SSDs shipping in 2008, clocking in at 40,000 vRPM1 and having anticipated performance of 200MB/sec (sustained) reads and 140MB/sec (sustained) writes.

vRPM - SanDisk says the vRPM figure for the new drives is 40,000. It calculates vRPM with this formula: vRPM = 50 / ((0.5 / 4kB random read IOPS) + 0.5 / 4kB random write IOPS)). The vRPM figure is a means SanDisk uses to compare SSD and HDD performance. The previous SATA 5000 notebook SSDs used the SATA 1 (1.5Gbit/s) interface, the slower TrueFFS precursor to Extreme FFS, and performed at 67MB/sec sustained and random reads, 47MB/sec sustained writes and 7MB/sec random writes.