SanDisk Announces Low-Power SATA Initiative For Mobile SSDs

There are plenty of announcements rolling in from the Intel Developers Forum in San Francisco this week, and one of them concerns SanDisk’s new proposed SATA standard called SATA DEVSLP. Simply put, SATA DEVSLP is designed to enable SSDs to consume less power while still ensuring excellent performance.

According to SanDisk, current SSDs support low 50mW power consumption, but with the new standard in place, the company asserts that the low power state could drop to 5mW. This would be accomplished by keeping the drives in a low power state most of the time.

The target here is mobile computing, of course; reducing the power demands of a mobile device’s components preserves the life of its battery.

“Anticipating this growing challenge, we set to work on the SATA DEVSLP technologies to offer considerably more power-efficient options to anyone designing in the mobile space,” said Kevin Conley, senior vice president, client storage solutions, SanDisk, in the press release.

SanDisk enjoys support in its initiative from industry bigs including Intel, Samsung, and Microsoft.

SANDISK DRIVES SATA LOW POWER INDUSTRY INITIATIVE FOR MOBILE COMPUTING DEVICES

Intel, Samsung and Microsoft Join SanDisk in Demonstrating Broad Support for New SATA-IO Standard Proposal

· SanDisk is first to implement SATA DEVSLP in solid state drives (SSD) with support from leading chipset, operating system and other storage vendors

· Proposed standard targets low power state for mobile devices—as low as 5-milliWatt (mW)

· New standard will enable mobile device manufacturers to integrate SSDs with significantly lower power consumption for faster performance and longer battery life

INTEL DEVELOPERS FORUM, Sept. 13, 2011—SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ: SNDK), a global leader in flash memory storage solutions, today announced that it is driving an industry initiative with other industry leaders that will enable OEMs to offer SSDs with SATA performance at significantly lower power consumption than current offerings. The initiative, called SATA DEVSLP, has the support of companies such as Intel, Samsung and Microsoft. Implementation is planned in future devices, chipsets and operating systems.

Today’s best-in-class SSDs support low power consumption of 50mW. Under the new SATA low power innovation, SATA storage remains in a low power state the majority of the time, improving power consumption by an order of magnitude compared to previous solutions.

“Mobile computing platforms such as Ultrabook™ devices and tablets are challenged to deliver the high performance and long battery life demanded by consumers,” said Jeff Janukowicz, research director, solid state drives, IDC. “The intent of this initiative is to extend the SATA high-performance standard to better address these low power mobile applications. It’s encouraging to see industry-wide support by key vendors in the mobile ecosystem and this is a big step toward widespread use of SSD solutions.” 

“Intel is aligned and supportive of low power SATA to reduce the total power budget,” said Erik Reid, general manager, mobile client platforms, Intel. “We are pleased to join SanDisk in leading this initiative and are very excited about its implications for the future of mobile computing. Innovation in ultra portable designs is dependent on important efficiency gains. By supporting SATA DEVSLP standardization, we’ll be enabling innovative designs for countless future mobile devices.”

“As the industry trends toward creating ever thinner and faster truly mobile computing products, the performance versus power demand tradeoffs will have even greater influence in the design process,” said Kevin Conley, senior vice president, client storage solutions, SanDisk. “Anticipating this growing challenge, we set to work on the SATA DEVSLP technologies to offer considerably more power-efficient options to anyone designing in the mobile space. We’re pleased to be working closely with our partners to enable the next generation of low power SATA computing devices.”