SanDisk Corporation gave a glimpse of ‘the next wave’. Its Vaulter Disk seems to be that intermediary step that combines solid state storage with present hard drive operations:

“…The Vaulter Disk is an interesting take on the idea of hybrid drives–a combination of spinning disk and flash-based memory–though SanDisk was quick to repeatedly point out that the Vaulter itself is not actually a hybrid drive itself. The solid-state PCI Express module attaches to a standard hard drive, enhancing boot-up speeds and taking some of the strain off of the CPU by storing and running the computer’s OS–the Vaulter itself has only enough memory (8GB or 16GB) to store the OS and a few more pieces of data.”

link: SanDisk Vault: Flash-based Hard Drive Enhancer

link: SanDisk Vaulter Disk press release

The focus is speed. This may be the start of the move to solid state flash hard drive. Some have called this a ‘platform shift’. There may be a day soon when the spinning hard drive is seen as quaint reminder of computer history. It may be similar to how the eight track cartridges passed into music history.

Catherine Forsythe

Tags: sandisk, vaulter disk, speed, hard drive, solid state, the next wave