SanDisk Unveils New SanDisk Ultra II Solid State Drive

SanDisk Corporation announced the new SanDisk Ultra II Solid State Drive with enhanced SSD Dashboard. The new drive is designed to deliver a cost-effective and easy upgrade solution for PC owners looking to improve performance, battery life, and power efficiency. The enhanced SSD Dashboard provides visibility into the drive’s performance, security, and available firmware updates, to maintain peak performance at all times.

“We live in an era where we expect to have information at our fingertips any time, anywhere, with technology that keeps us connected to both our personal and work lives on devices that won’t fail,” said Dinesh Bahal, vice president of retail product marketing at SanDisk. “The new SanDisk Ultra II SSD, together with the improved SSD Dashboard, provides consumers with an easy, affordable way to ensure that their PC can keep pace with their increasingly connected, information-driven lifestyle.”

The drive promises up to 28 times the perfomance and up to 15 percent longer battery life compared to a 2½” 7200 RPM HDD. It featurs sequential read speeds of up to 550 MB/s and write speeds of up to 500 MB/s and is based on the X3 NAND Flash technology and comes equipped with nCache 2.0 technology. nCache utilizes a two-tiered caching architecture to optimize drive speed and endurance. The drive is also shock resistant, which keeps data safe even if the computer is bumped or dropped.

The SanDisk SSD Dashboard comes with 17 different languages to choose from and will displays the drive’s performance, allow for manual or scheduled TRIM, update firmware when available and get tips on how to maintain the drive at its peak operation. It also has support features to get assistance from “Live Chat” and “Ask a Question via Email”. The Sandisk SSD Dashboard has the added value of an included Drive-cloning tool that works in 3 easy steps, Antivirus based on Trend Micro Titanium Antivirus and has theft recovery powered by Absolute LoJack.

“Consumers upgrading their PC for a faster experience with the SanDisk Ultra II SSD want the data migration process to be easy,” said Mike McCandless, vice president of sales and marketing, Apricorn, Inc. “We’re excited to partner with SanDisk to provide the Apricorn EZ Gig cloning software to SanDisk customers for simple data migration from slower hard disk drives. EZ Gig is available either through the new SanDisk SSD Dashboard software suite or within the SanDisk SSD Conversion kit and works with all SanDisk client SSDs.”

The SanDisk Ultra II SSD comes with a 3-year warranty and a rated endurance of 1.75 million hours. It will be available worldwide by Sandisk’s network of authorized distributors and resellers in September. It will be offered in capacities of 120GB (MSRP $79.99), 240GB (MSRP $114.99), 480GB (MSRP $219.99), and 960GB (MSRP $429.99).