Last year SanDisk introduced the SanDisk Tech Assisted Refresh (STAR) program for enterprises to ease the transition from hard disk drives (HDDs) to SSDs. SanDisk gained valuable experience from its internal upgrade program where 4,600 employees’ laptops were migrated from HDDs to SSDs and with STAR program SanDisk is bringing the benefits of its internal program to all enterprises.

The core benefit of STAR program is that it requires no resources from the customer company. One of the main obstacles of SSD upgrades is the fact IT managers cannot abandon their daily routines and perform SSD upgrades on hundreds, or even thousands of computers, and hiring temporary workforce is both risky and expensive. In SanDisk’s STAR program, the upgrade and migration is fully done by SanDisk’s technical specialists, who will come onsite and perform the data migration and SSD installation overnight, resulting in zero downtime for the employees.

For any company, one of the most important financial metrics is the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). By upgrading existing laptops with SSDs, companies are able to extend the lifecycle of a laptop from 3-4 years to 4-5 years, which results in annual savings of approximately $400 per laptop. For a company with 1,000 corporate laptops, that is deferred savings of $400,000 by simply extending the lifecycle of the laptop with an SSD.

Additionally, SSDs have higher reliability and lower failure rates when compared with traditional HDDs because SSDs are not susceptible to mechanical wear or crashes due to jarring motion. With less failures, there is less downtime for employees and the IT managers can also focus on other duties rather than replacing failed HDDs and reimaging the system data. Furthermore, SSDs offer significantly higher performance and battery life, which allows the employees to work longer and more efficiently. When considering all the advantages, SanDisk estimates that an SSD equipped laptop results in total annual savings of $610 per laptop.

For full details and customer experiences of SanDisk’s STAR program, please refer to the STAR SSD Upgrade Program whitepaper.

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  • jjj - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link

    If Anandtech has no ethics and does sponsored posts, one would hope that Sandisk would be wiser than to do this kind of thing.
    Anyway , i hear Sandisk has a bit of a yield problem on 15nm , so some details on that would be interesting.
  • Kristian Vättö - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link

    I see no problem with ethics as this is clearly marked as a sponsored post with us, editors, having nothing to do with the content itself. This isn't anything new either as we've had sponsored posts for years.

    http://www.anandtech.com/tag/sponsored-post
  • arnavvdesai - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link

    Previous posts were clearly marked as such. Its a simple bait & switch is what it is & please do not pretend to say otherwise. You wanted people to click & come in expecting an article. (caveat emptor is a disgusting excuse)
  • WagonWheelsRX8 - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link

    I agree. I thought this was going to be an in-depth article about SSDs, not an advertisement. Very disappointing. Next thing you know we'll see Buzzfeed inspired headlines! 'Anandtech installs an SSD, you won't believe what happens next!'
  • JonnyDough - Saturday, April 4, 2015 - link

    Deception on the internet? Egads.
  • Mr Perfect - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link

    I didn't notice it was marked, just clicked on the next article in the pipeline and wondered why it sounded like an ad.
  • hammer256 - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link

    Tom's has a clear label at the home page, next to the title of the article, that it's a sponsored post. I think it might be a good idea for Anandtech to do something similar.
  • Gigaplex - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link

    Odd - when I look at this page, the title starts with "Sponsored Post:", the author is "Sponsored Post" and it's marked as "Posted in Sponsored Post". It was pretty clear to me before I even started reading it that this was a sponsored post.
  • Minion4Hire - Friday, April 3, 2015 - link

    Earlier in the day, "Sponsored Post" was not part of the title although the author was still listed as such. That was added to the title later, no doubt because of the criticism they are now receiving.
  • JonnyDough - Saturday, April 4, 2015 - link

    ...and yet you still came here. Had I known it was an advertisement I'd have skipped it.

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