While HDDs and SSDs might operate in a pretty small form factor compared to their storage grandparents, they still aren't quite miniature enough for a tablet to take advantage of them. Fortunately, that's where iNAND flash comes in and Sandisk has today, debuted a new Extreme version of its embedded flash drive.

The plan is for OEM manufacturers to pick up the iNAND Extreme for use in Android and Windows 8 tablets featuring Intel Atom processors, thereby offering high speed data access to go with strong processing power. Sandisk is keen to point out that it offers smooth HD video play back, fast data sync with cloud backup accounts and improved application and OS launch speeds.

“We are pleased to offer the tremendous storage performance of SanDisk’s iNAND Extreme for use in tablets incorporating Intel’s impressive new Intel Atom platform,” said Drew Henry, senior vice president and general manager, Mobile and Connected Solutions, SanDisk. “We have clearly just scratched the surface of the potential for tablets to transform the user experience, and our iNAND Extreme enables developers to introduce the next wave of highly responsive tablets that offer richer entertainment, awe-inspiring graphics, and more productive business applications.”

Performance wise, the Extreme offers sequential read/write speeds of 45 and 50MBps respectively, and random read/write speeds of 800 4k IOPS. It'll be available in sizes ranging from 8GB, all the way up to 128GB.

While these storage devices won't be available commercially, expect them to appear in OEM manufactured devices within the next few months.

Kitguru Says: Good to see tablets are getting some high read write performance numbers. Should speed things up nicely. 

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