I've been talking about something like this for years now, dedicated hi-speed storage for all the caching and pre-fetching Windows does all the time. Enhanced start-up times, OS response, less of a performance hit on the background operations. No need to raid 3-4 hard drives to get noticeable results.

This should have happened years ago imho, but better late than never.

I don't see this taking off... one of those niche things you look back on and wonder why people spent money on it.
NAND will help speed up PCs... but I'll wait for it in a standard SSD environment, without the driver complication of something like this.

wasnt there a product back on 05/06, where you could stick 4 sticks of DDR? ram on a board and plug said board into a sata port, then load your windows onto it for fast booting. had a battery to prevent data loss when you unplugged it as i recall....

Intel released earlier this year TurboCACHE, as part of the Santa Rosa platform. Unfortunately it was only limited to 1GB at time of release. Same premise and same PCIe slot for notebooks too...

I will give Kudos to Sandisk for making this a lot larger than the competition's product. And just like Intel's the fact that it is modular instead of integrated, so when those flash chips wear out in 300,000 writes, it is nice to know I can replace it other than trashing a hybrid hard drive for another one.

They've had OSs on cards for quite a while, but I haven't personally seen anything newer than Windows 3.1. The old cards were on ROMs, though, so it was impossible to make any changes. Flash performance/price is only now making this reasonable again.

Is this for laptops or desktops, or both. It would be nice is my desktop booted up faster.

[as mentioned in the article, it is for both. -ed]

I agree with ya Jay. Hard disks are way to slow. We still need the storage capacity of HDD's today, but we really need to cut the bottlenecks out of our systems. We keep getting faster buses and processors and memory, but the hard drive technologies are lagging far behind.

http://eboostr.com

If that means they will ship it only to Dell etc., it sucks pretty hard.
I hope it will make it to public (PC component stores), otherwise it is just another nonsense.
And - if it is not connected thru SATA or USB, how am I supposed to boot from it? Will it behave like booting from a network card (boot ROM)? Will it be "visible" during the OS installation (so I may choose to install the OS onto it)?

i think this device should be transparent to the o.s., i.e. no drivers, something like attaching it between the HDD and the motherboard so it can accelerate any kind of o.s., db or whatever it's on the disk.
Along with some kind of intelligent algorithm so that it accelerates reading of frequent accessed sectors/data, and avoiding their trashing when first time sectors are read (as for large streams of data).

It's a pity that it will be not available for retailers, i could think of a lot of users wanting to accelerate MS Windows loading time on their not-so-old computers.

Miguel Pasenau

No offense, but thanks for stating the obvious. If a company could provide a significant upgrade over existing HDD's and keep it economical, don't you think they would? All storage technologies that exist in production right now have trade-offs. And the one trade off most people are not willing to live with out, is $$$$.

Just buy more memory for your PC and viola..if you have a slow PC then even this Sandisk won't help.

Seriously though, I can't down it until results come out on how much of an improvement this really makes...I just don't feel there will be a huge market for this. I would rather invest in RAM or a high RPM HD than one of these. Is this intended for ancient 3 year old systems or something?

Can one use it with any operating system or is it restricted to Win or MAC? I would love to try it with eComStation. http://www.ecomstation.com Since it is for OEM's only (at first?), one could buy a pc with it and install ones own operating system (with me it would be eCS http://www.ecomstation.com or ReactOS http://www.reactos.org or have a dual boot with both).

The link on the homepage (tgdaily's index.php) says "Samsung's flash accelerator" but brings me to this article for "Sandisk announces flash accelerator card".
The summary to the right of the image on the homepage states Sandisk, but the link (a few above the summary) says Samsung's.

Thanks.

Adding more ram is not an equivalent to a device like this. For example, 4 GB of ram is not going to make your system boot faster... because the disk drive contains all the data that needs to be moved into ram to boot.

A device like this would go a long way to increasing the perceived speed of an already fast computer which is always going to have the disk system be a bottleneck (unless you have a 4 disk RAID).

Let's see what happens over Christmas, that will be the true test of these new sales figures.

And as for PS3 have good games? Sure it has a some good games... but not a single GREAT game.

Nothing like :
HALO 3
BIOSHOCK
HALF-LIFE 2 : ORANGE BOX
GEARS OF WAR

Hang in there PS3 owners... 2008 is going to be a great year for you, or definitely 2009. At any rate there are bound to be GREAT games by 2010. Hang in there.

65MB/sec read and 13MB/sec write speeds are nothing to get excited about. These have to hit 200-400MB/sec for me to get excited.

[Modern hard drives read data about half that fast, though they write data nearly twice as fast. -Rick]

[Modern hard drives read data about half that fast, though they write data nearly twice as fast. -Rick]

Sorry Rick, I still must disagree. Maxtor Atlas 15k drive 80MB/sec read 81MB/sec write. At least according to http://www23.tomshardware.com/...&chart=325 . A raid configuration is even better. Since we are talking about the performance benefits of SSD's and not the energy savings benefits (laptops), this arguement is still won by the good old hard drive.

Dont get me wrong, I can't wait till I have a SSD doing 200MB-400MB . I would certainly pay a heavy premium for that. I still think the key is using real ram with a flash disk for the non-volitile memory. You won't get the write performance without some fancy write-thru caching, but read performance could easily flood a 3gbit/sec sata connection..

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=29&threadid=2117909

For $1000 worth of ram, you could have a 24GB drive cache. See here http://forums.anandtech.com/me...erthread=y

Thank you :)

This doesnt even compare to the speed and quality of I-Ram by gigabyte. Dual IRam raided with 8gig of ram is sweet and once its SATA2 it will be even better

A friend of mine at school has a 4Gb Sandisk. I just wanted to copy some data on to the flash drive for him, but when I inserted the damn thing in my USB, it started an uninvited install of something (the ReadyBoost stuff?), that was unstoppable and caused problems with my machine. I refuse to touch these things any more. Is it possible to use one of these JUST as a flash drive without getting forced into some software install you don't want?