No Spin Zone: Dell Ushers in Better Mobile Storage Reliability With Solid State Drives on Select Notebooks

ROUND ROCK, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) today announced that it is offering a 1.8-inch 32GB¹ solid state drive (SSD) from SanDisk on Latitude D420 ultra-mobile and D620 ATG semi-rugged notebooks. The company is one of the first to offer a flash-based drive as an alternative to hard disk drives (HDD) on corporate notebooks.

“We are committed to leading the industry in delivering these new drives and will offer them across Dell’s next-generation of Latitude products.”

Dell sees potential for flash-based drives and is committing to offer them across next-generation Latitude notebooks because they enable better reliability, increased performance and noise reduction.

A SSD is a hard drive alternative based on flash memory. Unlike a traditional HDD which uses spinning discs and read/write heads, a SSD is designed with flash memory with no moving parts. The new drive has the same shape and size as a HDD and uses the same connectors for integration into existing systems.

“A solid state drive is an excellent storage technology for our mobile users,” said Kevin Kettler, chief technology officer at Dell. “We are committed to leading the industry in delivering these new drives and will offer them across Dell’s next-generation of Latitude products.”

Reduced Cost Through Reliability, Increased Performance

Engineering tests show that the SSD has an operating shock tolerance of up to 1,300 Gs, which is twice the rating of mechanical drives. In fact, during extreme impact testing the surrounding notebook hardware breaks before the drive.² In addition, the drives are predicted to reduce the probability of failure by three-and-one-half times compared to standard mechanical drives.³ This will help reduce costs associated with hard drive failures, which analyst firm Gartner reports is one of two top sources of system malfunctions in notebooks and accounts for up to 45 percent of total hardware failures.⁴

“This represents an important milestone in the evolution of personal computers with the arrival of solid state flash memory as a durable, efficient alternative to the hard drive,” said Eli Harari, SanDisk’s founder and CEO. “For those enterprise road warriors who rely on their notebook PCs, hard drive crashes with attendant loss of critical data will soon be a thing of the past. We’re delighted that Dell has chosen the SanDisk SSD to launch this technology into their line of mobile PCs.”

The new drives can also increase system performance by up to 23 percent⁵ and decreases boot time by up to 34 percent compared to traditional HDDs available with the Latitude D420 and D620 ATG.⁶

Pricing and Availability

The SSD drives are available today at a list price of $549 in the Americas. Availability will soon follow in Europe and Asia.

About Dell

Dell Inc. (NASDAQ:DELL) listens to customers and delivers innovative technology and services they trust and value. Uniquely enabled by its direct business model, Dell is a leading global systems and services company and No. 34 on the Fortune 500. For more information, visit www.dell.com, or to communicate directly with Dell via a variety of online channels, go to www.dell.com/conversations. To get Dell news direct, visit www.dell.com/RSS.

Pricing, specifications, availability, and terms of offers may change without notice. Taxes, fees, shipping, handling and any applicable restocking charges are extra, and vary.

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¹ For solid state disk drives, GB means 1 billion bytes and TB equals 1 trillion bytes; actual capacity varies with preloaded material, diagnostics and operating environment and will be less than 30GB. With Dell Factory Image Restore installed, Windows Vista users will have 10GB of their solid-state drive capacity set aside for a recovery image.

² Based on SanDisk Environmental testing March 2007 comparing 32GB SSD vs. Std. 1.8-inch Dell HDD operational specifications.

³ Based on Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) calculations of 1.9M hours for SSD vs. 550K hours for standard HDD by Dell Labs using Telcordia methodology.

⁴ Gartner: “Benchmarking PC Hardware Reliability,” Leslie Fiering. June 2006.

⁵ Based on SysMark 2004se Benchmark test performed by Dell Labs in March 2007 on a Latitude D420 configured with Intel Core Duo 1.2GHz CPU, 512MB DDR2 memory, Intel GM 945 integrated graphics, Windows XP Pro, and 100GB 1.8-inch 4,200rpm HDD vs. the same configuration with 32GB SSD. Actual performance will vary based on configuration, usage and manufacturing variability.

⁶ Based on measurements of average boot time performed by Dell Labs in April 2007 on a Latitude D830 configured with Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2GHz CPU, 1GB DDR2 memory, Intel GM 965 integrated graphics, Windows Vista Ultimate and 100GB 1.8-inch 4,200rpm HDD vs. the same configuration with a 32GB 1.8-inch SSD. Actual performance will vary based on configuration, usage and manufacturing variability.