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I got a chance to speak to Doreet Oren, Director of Product Marketing, SSD for SanDisk.  She told me about the SSDs that SanDisk introduced at CES and we spoke about SanDisk’s plans.

SanDisk is focusing on two markets with their SSDs: netbooks and traditional laptops.  For the netbooks, SanDisk has its Pico SSD (pSSD) line.  The first generation was in the HP Mini-note.  The second generation pSSD has both SATA and 2nd generation PATA. 

The pSSDs

These pSSDs also have increased capacities of 32GB and 64GB, which is up from 16GB.  These new drives will be available in a month.  Ms. Oren could not discuss which companies they are working with right now, but expect their relationship with HP to continue. 

The SSDs

The regular notebook SSDs are what SanDisk calls their third generation product.  They claim that they have progressed so far that they skipped their second generation.  These new drives get over a problem faced in the first generation SSDs.  SanDisk has built algorithms that take into account the issues that plague flash in order to read and write at very high speeds. 

Since there is no actual way to rate the SSD in terms of RPMs, SanDisk has approximated the “VRPM,” where “V” stands for virtual, at 40,000 VRPM.  That’s an amazing speed. 

How to get them

To determine the price and capacity of the SSDs, SanDisk did research with focus groups and CIOs to see how much space is needed and how much they are willing to pay.  The answer was 100GB at $250.  So, SanDisk is releasing a 120GB model for $249 and a 240GB model for $499.  They are also offering a 60GB model for $149. 

These drives come in both 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch models.  They also hope to make these SSDs an attractive option to upgrade older laptops to these drives.

The new super-fast SSDs will be available to PC OEMs and retail in mid-2009.