SanDisk Woos Gamers with Extreme PRO Solid-State Drive

The debate on the advantages of the solid-state drive (SSD) versus the traditional hard disk drive (HDD) amongst gamers has a new argument as SanDisk (News - Alert) has launched an SSD built specifically for gaming.

SanDisk is serious about its Extreme PRO SSD, so much that it’s offering an unusually long 10-year warranty on the drives, which are available with in 240, 480 and 960 GB configurations. Typical warranties in the industry are three to five years.

Clearly SanDisk sees big potential in the gaming industry, which tends to favor SSDs because of shorter load times and faster transitions during gameplay.

“PC gaming is outperforming gaming consoles on a global basis,” said Philippe Willams, SanDisk Director of Retail Storage Worldwide. “PC gaming enthusiasts are looking for power and speed, and media professionals are frequently entrepreneurs who work for themselves. The faster their apps load, the better their productivity. And they need a storage device that won’t fail. Reliability and durability are critical for them.”

SanDisk is trying to meet that demand, and the company says the drives should endure more than 80 TB of write operations over their lifetime. The drives also will be equipped with standard SATA 6 Gbps interfaces and will be 7 mm high to fit in laptops.

According to SanDisk, the 240 GB Extreme PRO has sequential read and write speeds of up to 550MB/s and 520MB/s, respectively as well as random read performance of up to 100,000 IOPS and random write performance of up to 90,000 IOPS. The 480 and 960 GB models boast similar numbers except the sequential write performance is 515MB/s.

The company also reports the SanDisk Extreme PRO is compatible with SanDisk's SSD Dashboard application for Windows, which includes drive performance monitoring, firmware updates, manual or scheduled TRIM, secure erase, and drive health, longevity and temperature indicators.

The Extreme PRO SSD should hit stores this month. The 240 GB will retail for $189, the 480 GB for $369 and 960 GB for $599.