ASUS Selects SanDisk Solid State Drive (SSD) for New Ultra-Thin Notebook

SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ: SNDK), a global leader in flash memory storage solutions, today announced that ASUS has selected the U100 drive for use in the new UX Series ultra-thin notebook. The drive’s flexible, cost-effective SATA III performance and low power consumption allows ASUS to deliver a sleek, powerful notebook with a long battery life.

SanDisk created a customized SSD form factor for ASUS' new ultra-thin laptop. (Photo: Business Wire)

The recently announced U100 drive builds upon the successful SanDisk® P4 modular SSD series, which is widely used in ultra-thin notebooks and other mobile computing platforms. The ASUS UX Series notebooks measure 0.3cm to 1.7cm thick and weigh only 1.1kg while providing remarkable performance with a SATA III SSD, Intel^® core CPU and Instant-On technology.

“SanDisk tailored their SSD to meet our specific needs and then helped us optimize the drive in our new UX Series notebook,” said S. Y. Shian, corporate vice president and general manager, notebook business unit, ASUS. “SanDisk’s U100 drive allows our notebook to achieve the thin size, fast performance and long battery life needed to produce an enjoyable user experience.”

“The ASUS UX Series notebook combines advanced features with the portability that consumers demand from a mobile computing platform,” said Kevin Conley, senior vice president, solid state drives, SanDisk. “Our form factor miniaturization leadership enabled us to customize the U100 drive according to ASUS’ needs while providing high performance and low power consumption.”

The U100 drive delivers fast SATA III performance with up to 450 megabyte per second (MB/sec)¹ sequential read and up to 340MB/sec sequential write speeds¹. The drive’s low-power architecture allows OEMs to extend battery life while maintaining high performance. The U100 is available in a variety of form factors, including Half-Slim SATA SSD, mSATA, mSATA mini and 2.5” cased, with capacities ranging from 8 gigabytes (GB)² to 256GB.

SanDisk SSDs Offer Additional Benefits

• nCache™ Acceleration Technology³ provides fast random burst write performance for improved system responsiveness and multitasking functionality
• Based on a JEDEC-standard package for industry compliance

About SanDisk:

SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ: SNDK) is a global leader in flash memory storage solutions, from research and development, product design and manufacturing to branding and distribution for OEM and retail channels. Since 1988, SanDisk’s innovations in flash memory and storage system technologies have provided customers with new and transformational digital experiences. SanDisk’s diverse product portfolio includes flash memory cards and embedded solutions used in smart phones, tablets, digital cameras, camcorders, digital media players and other consumer electronic devices, as well as USB flash drives and solid-state drives (SSD) for the computing market. SanDisk’s products are used by consumers and enterprise customers around the world.

SanDisk is a Silicon Valley-based S&P 500 and Fortune 500 company, with more than half its sales outside the United States. For more information, visit www.sandisk.com.

1. Based on SanDisk internal testing of sequential read and write speeds; performance may be lower depending upon host configuration, host device, OS and application. 1 megabyte (MB) = 1 million bytes. Technical Specifications are preliminary and subject to change.

2. 1 gigabyte (GB) = 1 billion bytes. Some capacity not available for data storage.

3. nCache™ acceleration technology is a large Non Volatile Write Cache, a unique feature in SanDisk U100 SSD that improves random write performance to ensures an improved user experience. Studies show that modern operating systems mostly access the storage device using 4k access blocks. The cache is filled during these small write commands and emptied during idle time when the host is not accessing the drive, with no risk of data loss. For a typical everyday use, the write performance that the users see is the nCache™ (burst) high performance, and not steady state (sustained) SanDisk U100 SSD performance. Based on IOmeter 4K random write test.

SanDisk’s product and executive images can be downloaded from http://www.sandisk.com/corporate/media.asp

SanDisk’s web site/home page address: http://www.sandisk.com

© 2011 SanDisk Corporation. All rights reserved. SanDisk and the SanDisk logo are trademarks of SanDisk Corporation, registered in the United States and other countries. nCache is a trademark of SanDisk Corporation. Other brand names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their respective holder (s).

This press release contains certain forward-looking statements, including expectations for new product introductions, applications, features, markets, and customers that are based on our current expectations and involve numerous risks and uncertainties that may cause these forward-looking statements to be inaccurate. Risks that may cause these forward-looking statements to be inaccurate include among others: the market demand for our products may grow more slowly than our expectations or our products may not perform as expected and the other risks detailed from time-to-time in our Securities and Exchange Commission filings and reports, including, but not limited to, our most recent quarterly report on Form 10-Q and annual report on Form 10-K. We do not intend to update the information contained in this press release.

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