Dell Releases Flash-Based Laptops

joetheprogrammer writes "Dell has announced that they are going to offer a special configuration option with its Latitude D420 laptop that will allow users to swap clunky old HDs in favor of a 32GB SanDisk Flash hard drive. The only hitch comes with the price tag, which is set at a rather expensive price of $549. This will definitely ensure the laptop is set for a very high-profile consumer. 'The 1.8-inch 32GB SanDisk SSD, which SanDisk announced in January, increases performance by as much as 23 percent and is three and a half times less likely to fail when compared with HDDs currently available for the Latitude line, Dell said. The drive, currently available in North and South America, costs $549 -- on par with the 32GB drive Sony is offering exclusively in Japan for the Type-G Vaio. SanDisk will expand SSD availability to Europe and Asia in the near future.'"

Comments

Re:two questions

[NerveGas]

Flash-based drives have MUCH lower latency than spindle-based disks. If your drive has an average seek time of, say, 15 milliseconds, you're limitted to about 60 I/O operations per second no matter how little bandwidth you're using. While the actual transfer speed of flash is roughly similar to a current hard drive, the decrease in latency will be very appreciated in some situations.