After having been talked about on the internet and among 'techies' for quite some time (a year or more) major manufacturers are finally looking at flash memory based drives as an alternative to traditional platter-and-magnet hard drives. Dell announced (http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/04/25/HNdellssd_1.html) that they are introducing a solid-state flash drive as a $550 (!!) option on their Latitude D420 and D620 notebooks.

According to Dell's statistics, it offers up to 23% increase in performance, and can take more punishment than the notebook case itself can take. Personally I'm interested in battery consumption numbers, and if this really makes as huge a difference as it's been theorised. Batteries still end up being the bottleneck on computer hardware improvements - there hasn't really been a huge jump in battery capacity in years, just in lowering the consumption of the components, so every little bit does help.

This makes Dell the second manufacturer, behind Sony, to do this, and the first to offer it in North America (and South America). For once Dell's ahead of the curve, instead of imitating the curve! (Laugh, it's a joke - I use a Dell laptop.)

Certainly this is a little less common a news item than things about the ebook readers (nice, but expensive! - ok, this is expensive too...), but it's important to remember some of us still use laptops. ;)

[Found via Slashdot (http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/26/2049235).]

Once it is available in a convertible tablet/laptop, I will no longer want or need an ebook reader. Cool.

I guess, lot different holding a 12-14" screen, 4-6 pound laptop to read from an LCD than a svelte book-size eInk Sony Reader.

Solid-state memory (and OS) is the natural next step for computers, so this is good to see. I don't know if it'll replace an e-book reader, but it wouldn't replace my handheld... it would be the natural companion to it. And I expect power consumption to look much better than even an energy-star PC or laptop, good for those of us who are energy-conscious.

SanDisk just announced (http://www.webwire.com/ViewPressRel.asp?aId=38200) today that they've developed a 64GB SSD. Fairly impressive specs on the rascal:* Durability and reliability. SanDisk SSDs deliver 2 million hours mean time between failures (MTBF)2, approximately six times more than notebook hard disks. With no moving parts, SanDisk SSDs are also much less likely to fail when a notebook computer is dropped or exposed to extreme temperatures.

* High performance. With no moving parts, the flash-based SSD starts working almost immediately to achieve far better access speeds than a conventional hard disk drive. For example, in notebook computers, data moves to and from an SSD more than 100 times faster than data moving to and from a hard disk. SanDisk SSDs offer a sustained read rate of 67 megabytes (MB) per second3 and a random read rate of 7,000 inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) for a 512-byte transfer4. As a result, notebooks equipped with a 2.5-inch SanDisk SSD can boot Microsoft® Windows® Vista™ Enterprise in as little as 30 seconds5 and access files at an average speed of 0.11 milliseconds6. A notebook using a hard disk requires an average 48 seconds to boot and an average 17 milliseconds to access files.

* Low power consumption. Compared to a typical hard disk drive, which consumes 1.9 watts7 during active operation, SanDisk SSDs consume 1.0 watt (0.5 watts for 1.8") while active and as little as 0.4 watts (0.2 watts for 1.8") while idle. This difference in power efficiency is particularly important in extending battery life for road warriors, enabling them to remain productive while in transit.

It's about time such a thing happens! Next in line would be flash based instant on OS. Foleo has something there but it needs that drive.

Put it all in a hard case and you have a real portable tool.

I scrapped most of my computers when the hard disk failed. Instead of replacing it, I chose to upgrade the whole thing, OS and all. But this new way will make my computers last longer and really make a deliberate replacement difficult. Can you imagine updating your computer and bringing that drive to it? There would be some time saved!