SanDisk announced a 32GB drive for commercial notebooks that stores information on flash memory chips. The drive is available only to manufacturers, and the company declined to give out pricing or identify any notebook makers that will adopt it.

Flash is a technology that has no moving parts unlike normal hard drives that store data on spinning plates and use an arm-mounted head for reading and writing.

Flash also can retrieve data faster. In its own tests, Sandisk says its flash drive can boot-up Windows Vista in 35 seconds, a half-minute faster than the 55-second boot-up time required with a conventional drive.

Here is a short movie that shows the speed difference between a flash-based notebook and a typical HDD-based system.



SanDisk also claims an average of two million hours of use before a failure. The commercial drive contains a controller and other electronics that reduce power consumption and the overall cost of the drive that make it possible to put it into high-end corporate notebooks.
SanDisk delivers the drive into a 1.8-inch package, mostly to make it easier for notebook makers to adopt it. The package can be reduced or increased so that a flash drive could fit into a notebook with a 2.5-inch drive chassis.

But adoption by consumers might be slow. Hard drive makers are currently developing hybrid drives which are a new type of large-buffer computer hard disk drives. They are different from standard hard drives because they use a large buffer (up to 1 GB) of non-volatile flash memory to cache data during normal use.

"Hybrid drives have more potential for the mass market as customers could benefit from the quicker boot-up times, but also maintain the advantage of the greater storage capacity of traditional hard drives".
The debate between flash makers and hard drive manufacturers will be one of the big topics at the Computer Electronics Show and Storage Visions, which both take place next week in Las Vegas.

written by Cristian L.