SanDisk pushes for low-power SATA specification

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."