Solid State Drives for Laptops
January 5th, 2007I typically ignore the ceaseless grind of computer hardware developments, but this is pretty incredible. Solid state disk technology has been around for a long time, but only the top end government, military and corporate computing environments would demand, and be able to afford, such technology. See Texas Memory Systems.
Solid state drives are about to start appearing in consumer laptops. While they’ll command a premium of several hundred dollars, at first, they will be the way to go if speed, reliability/durability and power efficiency are your primary concerns. If you need massive capacity, not so much.
Additionally, armaments makers and military organizations from all over the world will be buying these drives by the truckload for use in battlefield systems.
Via: ZDnet:
SanDisk wants to replace the hard drive in notebooks with flash memory, a swap that it says will make thin laptops faster and more reliable.
The switch, however, will cost you a few hundred dollars more.
SanDisk on Thursday released a 32GB drive for commercial notebooks that stores information on flash memory chips rather than the magnetic platters that make up a traditional hard drive. The drive is available only to manufacturers, and the company declined to give out pricing or identify any notebook makers that will adopt it, but SanDisk said notebooks sporting the drive could come out in the first half of 2007.
…
SanDisk gained the bulk of its expertise in these drives when it acquired Msystems, an Israeli outfit that was an early pioneer of USB flash keys.
“A few years ago, some of the people at Msystems told me their most expensive drives cost $70,000,” said Jim Handy, chief analyst at Objective Analysis. “They are very tightly connected to the military in Israel.”
The commercial drive from SanDisk contains a controller and other electronics that reduce power consumption and the overall cost of the drive that make it possible to slip it into high-end corporate notebooks, Oren said.
SanDisk packaged the drive into a 1.8-inch package, mostly to make it easier for notebook makers to adopt it. The package can be shrunk (to reduce the overall size of the notebook) or increased so that a flash drive could fit into a notebook with a 2.5-inch drive chassis.
“We can and will do other form factors,” Oren said.
In Other News: The Terabyte Hard Drive
