Joy of Flash
The News.com posting A flash memory notebook: The sounds of silence is a first hand account of living with a solid-state drive installed in a notebook.
(Credit: Samsung)
Flash drives, which store data in NAND flash memory, don’t require motors or spinning platters. Thus, there are no whirring mechanical noises.
Is the quiet and extra battery life worth nearly a $900 premium? In a word, no, but you’ve got to look at the future. Although in the price stratosphere now, flash drives will start to compete more directly with drives over the next four years. Flash memory density continues to increase at a rapid pace, doubling almost every year, and large manufacturers like Samsung, Toshiba, SanDisk and Intel have or are opening factories geared at churning out flash. Taken together, this will lead to an easy availability of chips, better capabilities, and recurring price wars.
The drawback is the price. The same Latitude with an 80GB standard hard drive currently sells for $869 on Dell’s site. Swapping the drive for a 64GB flash hard drive adds $899 to the price. The upgrade more than doubles the price of the notebook to $1,768 and slightly eliminates storage.
Let the price wars begin.
…John
