32GB Flash announced

[EgeBamyasi]

This article is about Flash for laptops but I'm sure we can expect it to trickle down to smaller personal devices. See article below.

SanDisk introduces 32GB Flash-based notebook drive
1/4/2007 9:34:21 PM, by Matt Woodward
The hard drive is a critical component of every modern computer system. It loads and stores practically everything about the computer, from the OS to all the programs to every data bit and document. Yet the hard drive is based on a mechanical spinning disk system that is ultimately prone to failure, usually due to the stress of heat and motion. Laptop hard drives typically take more abuse than their desktop counterparts and therefore have an even higher rate of failure. Fortunately, SanDisk has taken the first steps to potentially ending all of this. The company has developed a new solid-state 32GB hard drive for notebooks that is based entirely on NAND flash RAM.
The 32GB SanDisk SSD UATA 5000 is only a 1.8" form-factor drive, but it has mighty impressive specifications despite its size: 62MB/sec sustained throughput, 0.12ms average access time, and it draws only 0.4 watts. This means that the SanDisk SSD has an average access time that is more than 100 times faster than any notebook hard drive, and it draws 50 to 87 percent less power than most notebook hard drives. While its sustained throughput is roughly on par with most notebooks, it should be noted that the throughput is the same regardless of whether it is reading at the beginning or the end of the drive. (Hard disks typically have higher throughput rates on their outer tracks and slower throughput rates on their inner tracks.) In addition, everything is solid-state, so there are no moving parts. Even if you are the type to drop or bang your laptop around on a regular basis, there are no hard disk heads to crash into spinning platters.
Although flash memory can be known to eventually "wear out" due to writing to the same area repeatedly, modern flash memory controllers have automatic "wear-leveling" to ensure longevity of the device by making sure that sectors are being written to evenly and bad sectors are dynamically remapped to good ones. According to SanDisk, the SSD UATA 5000 is rated at "two million hours mean time between failure (MTBF)."
What does this mean to the average notebook user? SanDisk's drive boasts considerably faster data access, slightly longer battery life, and higher reliability. Unfortunately, the cost for such a drive is somewhat prohibitive at $600. It would seem that SanDisk's target market is currently the enterprise user, but naturally as flash memory prices continue to come down and more flash manufacturers get into the hard drive business, we should expect to see them in consumer-grade laptops in the proverbial three to five years.

[CrowdAds]

[sumx4182]

Great news...this flash drive is almost as big as my current laptops internal HD (40gb)...it would be nice if they could make it so that you could replace your HD with a flash HD as a part for part swap...like, put the flash drive in a casing that will have the same connections and dimensions as the existing hard drive so you could just unplug your current mechanical HD and plug this new one right in its place...

[Amblin]

Its only going to get better with technology like this. Soon Flash based MP3 players will boast better and better capacities, and iPod will go under. Amen.

[dfkt]

This is what I've been waiting for all my (computer) life.

http://www.sandisk.com/Oem/Default.aspx?CatID=1478

Sumx4182, unfortunately it's an 1.8" drive, it won't fit in a 2.5" laptop HDD housing (at least without an additional frame). But it would be nice inside my iAudio X5.

[sumx4182]

well that's what i mean, house it in a bigger frame...kinda like putting an internal HD inside an enclosure and setting up some kinda of adapter to make the connection possible....