SanDisk, well known for flash data storage products has released a 32GB Laptop Battery flash drive targeted at business laptops, according to c|net. Like USB pen drives and flash memory cards commonly used in digital cameras, the flash drive has no moving parts and thus is more reliable and consumes less power than common magnetic storage based hard drives. As a result, they can survive drops that would destroy most hard disk drives and increase battery life by around 10%. The drive package is available in the common 2.5" size, 1.8" for ultra slim laptops and if needed other Sony laptop battery form factors also.
As Flash drives lack the seek time that would be involved with moving heads on traditional hard disk drives, data can be accessed much quicker. According to SanDisk, in their tests involving a system tested with a flash drive and a conventional hard disk, the Windows Vista operating system took just 35 seconds to boot-up on the Flash drive, compared with 55 seconds on the hard disk.
So far, Military and aerospace Sony VGP-BPS10 battery customers have been using flash hard drives for about a decade, some with 256GB of storage. But with these drives topping at $70,000 a few years ago, it is not until now that the pricing of flash has come down enough for flash hard drives to be even be considered in high end corporate laptops.
SanDisk has only released its flash drive to manufacturers and has not provided any info on pricing or manufacturers that will use its drives, however SanDisk mentioned that Sony VGP-BPS9 battery the first flash drive based laptops are due to hit the market in the first half of 2007. An analyst expects the drive to add $600 to the cost of a laptop over regular hard disk drives.
As NAND flash memory makers have managed to double the capacity of its chips each year over the past few years, at this rate we may see 128GB flash drives in two years, along with more reasonable prices for lower capacity versions. It will be interesting Sony VGP-BPS8 battery to see how long it will take for flash drives to reach the point where they can replace traditional hard disks in desktops and possibly even servers, assuming some other competitor to flash does not become available in the meantime.
Hybrid hard disks buy time for standard hard drive design...
Whilst we all think of flash memory as relatively slow compared to the main RAM memory in our computers, it's easy to forget that it's still considerably faster than Sony VGP-BPS5 battery the top flight hard disks. Over the last year there have been several references to the fact that this has not escaped the notice of the major hard disk manufacturers, who reportedly have announced this week that they will come together under the 'Hybrid Storage Alliance' (HSA). The companies on board for this venture are Seagate Technology, Hitachi, Samsung, Fujitsu and Toshiba (Western Digital are notable by their absence).
At the moment, the major commercial Sony VGP-BPS3 battery obstacle to making 100% flash drives is the cost of chip manufacture (Sandisk recently announced a flash-only drive which adds $600 to the price of a laptop - see the article by Seán below). Basically the notion behind the Hybrid Storage Alliance is to manufacture a drive with the best of both worlds: essential fast-access data such as database indexes are stored on a flash memory area, with the major 'weight' of information residing on the conventional magnetic platters. Such an approach is also supported by Windows Vista, in which the 'ReadyDrive' facility has the ability to detect and write to these faster drive data storage areas.
However clever this combination of technologies may appear, one can't help thinking that this 'alliance' announcement is a corporate response Sony VGP-BPL2 battery to Sandisk's bold and original commercial-scale development, and is really only a stopgap measure until the price of flash memory decreases further and provides a real challenge to the 'platter-peddlers' strategy.
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