SanDisk has started shipping their new G3 Solid State Drives (SSD) in US and Europe. SanDisk claims that the new drive offers twice the performance of traditional hard drive. G3 SSD opens files up to twice as fast and is more rugged compared to a 7,200 RPM hard disk drive according to the company.

“Our rugged drive enables a superior customer experience by delivering extended endurance and fast performance in a resilient SSD design,” said Eric Bone, vice president retail product marketing, SanDisk. “SanDisk believes in an uncompromising development approach which insists that a SSD’s long term reliability and durability are just as important as its overall speed. We’re leveraging our long history of flash memory and retail expertise to bring the SanDisk G3 SSD to market.”

SanDisk G3 SSD has sequential performance of up to 220MBps read speed and up to 120MBps write speed. It is compatible with Mac OS X Snow Leopard, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Linux and Windows 7 with support for TRIM feature. SanDisk G3 will come in 60GB and 120GB models priced $229.99 and $399.99 respectively.