SanDisk has announced a solid state drive (SSD), called the uSSD 5000 that it says will be perfect for sub £100 laptops for third-world countries at IFA 2007 in Berlin, Germany.

Proving the point, the new drives, which are a USB module designed to be embedded directly onto the motherboard will be put into the intel-powered classmate PC.

The uSSD 5000 solid state drive supports a variety of operating systems, including Microsoft’s Windows XP Professional, Windows XP Embedded, Windows Embedded for Point of Service and Windows CE, as well as Linux. The uSSD 5000 solid state drive is expected to be available in capacities from 2GB to 8 GB.

At 27 x 38mm, uSSD 5000 solid state drives are about one-fourth the size of 1.8-inch hard disk drives.

“The low-cost educational PC category is an emerging market for flash storage where low cost, ruggedness and low power consumption will be the primary factors for broad-based adoption”, said Greg Rhine, senior vice president and general manager of the Consumer Products Division at SanDisk.