SanDisk announces the Ultra II series of SSDs, targets mainstream upgraders

From PC World: PC enthusiasts dig the very fast solid-state drives that SanDisk builds, but the drives in the company’s Extreme Pro line can be pricey. The Ultra II series of SSDs that SanDisk announced today target mainstream users who focus on price first and performance second.

As SanDisk product manager Jared Peck put it in a briefing last week: “We look at every piece of the market and want to make sure we have a good solution for each of them. The Ultra II line is aimed at mainstream users who are ready to upgrade from a hard drive or from an older, smaller SSD.”

The Ultra II line delivers less performance and comes with a much shorter warranty than SanDisk’s top-of-the-line Extreme Pro, but the Ultra II drives deliver a similar boost in performance over conventional hard drives at a much lower price per gigabyte. Where SanDisk expects to fetch $189 for a 240GB Extreme Pro ($0.78 per gigabyte), the company will be asking just $115 for a 240GB Ultra II drive ($0.48 per gigabyte).

SanDisk will also be shipping a 120GB drive, with 480- and 960GB capacities coming to market later this year, but Peck claims that “70 percent of market is buying 120- or 240GB drives.”

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