SanDisk Corporation, a global leader in flash memory storage solutions, today announced it has entered into a worldwide, exclusive agreement with Diskeeper Corp. to license its industry leading caching software solutions for solid state disk drives (SSDs).

Under the terms of the agreement, SanDisk will provide these solutions both as standalone software products as well as bundled with SanDisk's SSD products for client computing applications. The resulting hardware/software bundled solution from SanDisk will help its consumer OEM customers build optimized computing devices, such as Ultrabooks and other ultra-thin form factor products, that provide greater responsiveness, higher performance and an overall better user experience to consumers worldwide.

The agreement initially calls for SanDisk to exclusively license Diskeeper's ExpressCache and NowOn software products, which improve overall system performance and boot time in dual-drive (paired SSD and HDD) storage configurations. SanDisk has the ability to license other Diskeeper products currently in various stages of development for application across client and enterprise computing and mobile markets. Additional details of the agreement were not disclosed.

"The combination of Diskeeper's industry-leading ExpressCache and NowOn software offerings with SanDisk's broad and flexible client SSD solutions delivers the lowest-cost, smallest footprint implementation to meet Ultrabook requirements," said Kevin Conley, SanDisk's senior vice president and general manager, Client Storage Solutions. "We are excited to add these software solutions to our portfolio for standalone and bundled opportunities in this rapidly growing market."

"We see our alliance with SanDisk as a critical driver to accelerate adoption of SSD computing applications," said Jerry Baldwin, CEO of Diskeeper. "The exceptional performance and endurance of SanDisk SSDs paired with Diskeeper's ExpressCache and NowOn products offer consumer OEM customers industry leading performance optimization for Ultrabooks and other computer platforms."

Caching solutions used in computing provide a location for frequently accessed information to be stored and retrieved quickly. A high-performance flash memory-based cache can be combined with advanced caching software to improve the performance of hard disk drive (HDD)-based solutions, while keeping overall system costs low. Applications or devices that need to leverage the full capabilities of flash memory, like small footprint, low power consumption, high performance and reliability, can use complete SSD solutions in place of HDDs.