Lighter laptops move to flash-based drives

With 500-gigabyte hard drives in laptops coming soon, why would you even consider buying a notebook with a seemingly paltry 32GB or 64GB solid state drive?

The answer, computer makers hope, is because those laptops will appeal to weighed-down road warriors and corporations tired of fixing the hard drives of employees’ dropped or damaged notebooks.

Solid state drives, which use flash memory, are significantly more expensive than laptops with hard drives.

But with no moving parts, unlike hard disk drives, they’re also considered more reliable and rugged, boot up more quickly and can offer longer battery life.

In the past year, several notebooks in the 2- to 4-pound range using flash-based solid state drives have been released by companies such as Dell, Toshiba and Sony. Prices range from $2,100 to $3,400.

Moving toward solid state drives
Apple’s 3-pound MacBook Air, announced last week, is one of the higher-profile examples.

The laptop, with a 13-inch screen, comes in two versions.

The first has an 80-gigabyte hard disk drive, and starts at $1,799. The second has a 64-gigabyte solid state drive and starts at $3,098.

Neither comes with an optical drive, and both laptops look the same.

“It’s not visible from the outside, so it’s not like there’s much of a cool factor to it,” said Thomas Coughlin, author of “Digital Storage in Consumer Electronics: The Essential Guide,” due out in March.

“But if you’re really thumping that computer around, and vibration and shock resistance are important enough to you, you will pay the extra money to have a notebook that will perform under those conditions.”

“It’s exciting to see someone like Apple introduce a solid state option,” said Jeff Janukowicz, research manager for solid state drives and hard drive components at market research firm IDC.

“We’re at the beginning of a wave of seeing more personal computers introduced with SSD.”

$5.4 billion in revenues by 2011
IDC believes ultimately it will be a big wave. Solid state drive revenues are expected to increase from $373 million in 2006 to $5.4 billion in 2011, the research firm said in a report.

Flash memory is already widely used in smaller devices like digital music players, cell phones, GPS units and cameras.

Joggers who are music lovers know that a flash-based player is a better choice for their daily run compared to players with hard drives.  

Flash-based players are quick to boot up, and don’t face the risk of skipping or getting damaged as easily as players with hard drives.

Hard disk drives use rotating, magnetic platters to read, write and store data. Flash-based solid state drives are made up of chips, which are less volatile.

“There’s extremely high reliability with it, and the reason is that there’s no moving parts, there’s nothing spinning,” said Jim Elliott, director of flash marketing at Samsung Semiconductor, Inc.

“So it has very good impact resistance, and there’s virtually no heat and no noise.”

MORE FROM GADGETS

Gadgets Section Front

Sony opens up e-book Reader   Apple CEO's private matter a public concern It's taking time to 'grow' green PCs Latest and greatest in inexpensive tech 1,600-year-old version of Bible goes online Black market iPhones big in Russia, China Survey: Consumers steered to costlier TVs The market for skinny laptops gets fat Latest Mitch Albom treatise is online only Lighter laptops move to flash-based drives Gadgets Section Front   Add Gadgets headlines to your news reader: