Sandisk rolls out flash hard drives for laptopsSandisk wants to replace the hard drive in notebooks with flash memory, a swap it says will make thin laptops faster and more reliable.
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. While Sandisk shows off its flash drive there, drive makers will be touting hybrid hard drives. 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 research balloons--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. In its own tests, Sandisk says its flash drive can boot up Windows Vista--the next version of the Windows operating system--in 35 seconds, 28 seconds faster than the 55-second boot-up time required with a conventional drive. Military and aerospace customers have been buying so-called solid state flash drives for about a decade. Some have capacities of 256GB and are quite sophisticated. "They are in data recorders in airplanes," Oren said. "Breakage sometimes happens with military targets." Sandisk got the bulk of its expertise in these drives when it acquired Msystems, an Israeli outfit that was an early pioneer in USB flash keys. "A few years ago, some of the people at Msystems told me their most expensive drives cost US$70,000," said Jim Handy, chief analyst at Objective Analysis. "They are very tightly connected to the military in Israel." The commercial drive from Sandisk contains a controller and other electronics that reduce power consumption and the overall cost of the drive that make it possible to slip it into high-end corporate notebooks, Oren said. 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 so that a flash drive could fit into a notebook with a 2.5-inch drive chassis. | ||||
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