 SanDisk Corporation (then SunDisk) founders Eli Harari and Sanjay Mehrotra, along with Robert D. Norman, saw the potential of flash memory as an alternative to a hard drive, and filed a patent for a flash-based SSD in 1989.The first commercial flash-based SSD was shipped by SunDisk in 1991.It was a 20 MB SSD in a PCMCIA configuration, and sold OEM for around $1,000 and was used by IBM in a ThinkPad laptop.