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Dell Releases Flash-Based Laptops

Posted by Zonk on from the welcome-to-the-world-of-tomorrow dept.

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.'"

4 of 230 comments (clear)

  1. I hope the Sony drives ... by WrongSizeGlass · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... aren't made by their battery division. ;-)

  2. How would I know if the HDD failed... by ForestGrump · · Score: 5, Funny

    How would I know if the HDD failed if it no longer has the "click of death"?

    --
    Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
  3. Re:I for one... by Zeinfeld · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The cost is not very important. Whatever the drive costs today it will cost less in a years time.

    What is rather more interesting is what eliminating the hard drive will allow in terms of laptop design. A compact flash card is much smaller than a hard drive, the volume saved will be significant on compact format laptops.

    Another interesting difference is that it will be easier to make the drive easily removable on compact laptops. Today this tends to be a feature of the larger models which means that corporate IT depts are less willing to offer compact units.

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  4. Re:two questions by NerveGas · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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