Adtron Announces 160GB Solid-state Drive

Flash solid-state discs (SSDs) have generated a lot of interest from mobile users in the past few months. SanDisk has showed off its 32GB 1.8″ SanDisk SSD Ultra ATA 5000 back in January, while Ritek plans on launching 16GB, 32GB and 64GB SSDs later this year. Adtron is upping the ante with a 160GB SSD which will be available in SATA and IDE versions.

“New geometries and chip densities in SLC NAND enable Adtron to significantly expand the capacities of its industry leading high performance products,” said Alan Fitzgerald, CEO of Adtron. “In addition, the economics of these new flash drives combined with the increased capacities in standard form factors, greatly expand the applications among our historic flash disk customers in the industrial and defense markets, as well as addressing bandwidth intensive server and storage acceleration applications in a much broader emerging market previously the domain of HDD products.”

The IDE (I25FB) and SATA (A25FB) versions of Adtron’s SSDs use SLC NAND flash memory and will be available in a standard 2.5″ notebook form-factor. The I25B IDE SSD offers read speeds of up to 70MB/sec and write speeds of up to 60MB/sec. The A25FB is just a tad bit slower at 65MB/sec and 55MB/sec respectively.

The drives also feature the ArrayPro Performance Engine which enables the fast read/write speeds as well as Erasure Data Security which provides military-level protection. “ArrayPro separates an Adtron flash disk from the low-end single array SSD’s and those that employ caching technologies that require battery back-up and whose performance are highly application dependent,” said Alan Fitzgerald, Adtron Chief Technology Officer.

There is no word on pricing or availability for Adtron’s SSDs, but be prepared to shell out some big bucks. For reference, SanDisk’s 32GB drive is pegged at around $600 while Ritek’s 32GB drive will likely come in slightly below that figure so you do the math.