“SanDisk wants to replace the hard drive in notebooks with flash memory, a swap that it says will make thin laptops faster and more reliable,” Michael Kanellos reports for CNET News.
“The switch, however, will cost you a few hundred dollars more,” Kanellos reports.
Kanellos reports, “SanDisk on Thursday in the US released a 32GB drive for commercial notebooks that stores information on flash memory chips rather than the magnetic platters that make up a traditional hard drive. The drive is available only to manufacturers, and the company declined to give out pricing or identify any notebook makers that will adopt it, but SanDisk said notebooks sporting the drive could come out in the first half of 2007.”
Kanellos reports, “Unlike traditional hard drives, flash memory drives do not contain moving parts. As a result, flash devices are less prone to breaking down — flash cards can survive drops from great heights — and consume less energy. SanDisk’s flash drive can increase battery life by about 10 percent, said Doreet Oren, director of product marketing for SanDisk. Flash also can retrieve data faster.”
“SanDisk packaged the drive into a 1.8-inch package, mostly to make it easier for notebook makers to adopt it. The package can be shrunk (to reduce the overall size of the notebook) or increased,” Kanellos reports. “The drive will also add about US$600 to the cost of a notebook.”
Full article here.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Apple looks to use Intel’s Robson tech instead of Samsung’s hybrid flash technology for Macs – December 21, 2006
RUMOR: Apple to employ Intel’s ‘Robson’ NAND flash tech to create ‘instant-on’ Macs – November 22, 2005
New memory technology could replace flash and hard drives – December 11, 2006
Solid-state NAND Flash hard drives inch closer to portable computers – July 26, 2006
Flash memory poised to replace hard disk drives? – September 14, 2005
Um… How fast is it compared to an SATA drive?
Anyone?
Bueller?
make one that is about 120GB, and i’m all aboard. why would anyone want a 32GB hard drive, unless it was just for running the system software and for startups only (with a regular HD for everything else), and if it is only for that, it isn’t worth an extra $600.
Flash drive speeds vs disk drive speeds are what a cheetah vs a rabbit would be. Off the line the cheetah will cover more distance and the larger the distance the bigger the speed difference.
Huge speed difference and at 32 gig, it means we could see an iPod with it and even a Macbook with it.
i dont see why for 1 it would cost so much and 2 why 32gb is the limit. I would think that utilizing 2.5 inch drives and current 4gb chips, that would be plenty of space for an affordable 64gb drive.
Personally if i was in control of things, i would include both a regular drive and a flash drive. The flash drive would house a Mac OS designed specifically for this type of system where it would treat the flash drive and the hard drive as one drive, but would intelligently write non system files to the HDD while system updates and neccessities to the flash side, thus speeding up the system considerably but still have the large HDD space from a normal magnetic drive.
The next Intel motherboard chipset for Core 2 Duo laptops, codenamed “Santa Rosa”, will feature 800Mhz FSB and it will use flash memory to increase hard drive performance.
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20060307corp_b.htm
MacBook Pro will probably incorporate Santa Rosa in the fall, in time for the back-to-school rush. CPU speeds will be bumped to 2.4Ghz.
http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/11/06/intel_roadmap_11_2006/page2.html
I’ll wait for PRAM drives in 2008.
All that fuss, and the savings in battery usage is only 10%? What’s the point?
Macworld.
MAC TABLET.
With a 32 gig (or more) flash drive for storage. Smaller and lighter than any other tablet.
Why not, I say. It’s time.
Or, maybe I’m jumpin’ the gun, but it sure seems like more than a coincidence, hmm?
Less size and less power are the holy grail of Laptop Computers (Mac and PC).
I have a 40gb HD in my Powerbook. In three years I have never had a storage issue.
So give this thing a year or two to come down in price and up in capacity. Then we will be talking about half the price and double the size.
11″ MacPad Tablet anyone?
The problem with this in a laptop is that…
Flash memory increases boot times quite a bit because lots of little files have to be opened and there’s no heads that have to move..
But when you’re writing/reading big files the head isn’t moving in a hard drive and you get faster speeds from a conventional HDD.
So of course the ideal solution would be to move your home folder and apps onto the hard drive, leaving system files on the flash.
But..OS X won’t let us move the apps, at the moment.
“Unlike traditional hard drives, flash memory drives do not contain moving parts. …”
If it doesn´t contain any moving parts why is it then called a “drive”?
‘But when you’re writing/reading big files the head isn’t moving in a hard drive and you get faster speeds from a conventional HDD.’
You sure about that? Do you actually know how data is stored on a hard disk? It’s stored in cylinders of data across the drive platters to enable reading by multiple read heads (for speed) and if the file is large enough it’ll be stored across several logical cylinders of data and thus the hard drive head will move. Of course for the head to read the right data the platters need to be spun to move the data under the read head. This all needs to be factored in when calculating a hard disks speed. There are formulas for this stuff.
Please, don’t just pull information from your ass.
Anyway what I really wanted to say is that $600 is just too much for only 32Gb. We all agree it’s a great idea – but I’ll probably just let the early adopters pay the premium and buy the cheaper version 6 months later.
It would be cheaper to use four or eight smaller “drives”, like the tiny SD cards that go into a camera maybe, rather than a single large unit. Only 20MB/sec though.
That is $600 more. So the flash drive costs $600 + the cost of the conventional drive it replaces.
Don’t forget that new technology is always expensive. How much were the first home computers vs now? or 1st digital cameras compared to reg. cameras? Or DVD player vs VCR. The price will go down-way down.
Oh on the size thing (I often fill up my 80 gig laptop), if they are only 1.8 inches, why couldn’t 2 or 3 be used – at least until they get the bigger size in a smaller space ones.
I predict by 2010, 80% of new laptops will have flash drives.
How come 2GB of flash RAM for a memory stick costs WAY less than 2GB RAM for a Mac? Flash RAM used to cost more per MB/GB a decade ago. Is the price being kept artificially high?
Add several of those hard drives to a 17″ Mac Book Pro, with Blue Ray, and I’m all over it. 😀
So give this thing a year or two to come down in price and up in capacity. It always happens with any electronic.
11″ MacPad Tablet anyone – does it come out yet?
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