SanDisk on Thursday introduced high-capacity solid-state drives for laptops that the company said are affordably priced for business.

The G3 Series, which represent SanDisk's third generation of SSDs, was unveiled at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Where most SSDs used in mobile PCs are low-capacity devices often found in mini-notebooks, the latest drives have enough capacity and a low enough price to make them a more attractive alternative to hard-disk drives in mainstream business notebooks, the vendor said.

SanDisk launched the series with a 2.5-inch model, the C25-G3, and a 1.8-inch version, the C18-G3. Both devices are designed as drop-in replacements for hard-disk drives in laptops.

Both SSDs will be available in capacities of 60 GB, 120 GB, and 240 GB. The manufacturer suggested retail price is $149, $249, and $499, respectively. The products are scheduled to be available in the middle of this year.

While the price per gigabyte is still far more expensive than for HDDs, the SanDisk drives are more affordable than previous generations, making them more attractive to businesses looking for a faster, more reliable alternative to HDDs.

SanDisk claims the SSDs are more than five times faster than the fastest 7,200 revolutions per minute hard-disk drives used in laptops. The vendor also claims its devices are more than twice as fast as SSDs that shipped last year.

The latest devices operate at a 40,000 vRPM, or virtual RPM, a metric used to compare the speeds of SSDs and HDDs. The SanDisk drives read and write data at 200 MBps and 140 MBps, respectively.

"With large capacities and aggressive pricing, SSDs are poised to enter mainstream corporate notebooks in 2009," Rich Heye, senior VP and general manager of SanDisk's SSD business unit, said in a statement.

SanDisk claims corporate customers could extend by two years the life of existing Windows XP laptops by replacing their HDDs with the SSDs, which would give the systems a significant performance boost.

SSDs use flash memory chips to store data, so have no moving parts. As a result, the technology is quieter, uses less power and is more reliable than HDDs. In addition, SSDs are faster and are more rugged.