Sandisk rolls out flash hard drives for laptops
The flash drive isn't for everyone. At 32GB, it is far smaller than the conventional drives found in current notebooks, desktops or even MP3 players. Many business users, however, never max out the capacity on their drives. The drive will also add about US$600 to the cost of a notebook. Those prices will crimp sales, Handy said. "There are certain applications where it can be used, but I just don't see it for business where the most violent thing they (users) will encounter is a cab ride in New York," said Handy. Still, the capacity and price gaps will begin to erode over time, Oren said. NAND flash memory makers (NAND is the kind Sandisk makes) have managed to double the storage capacity of its chips nearly every year for the past few years. The NAND flash contained in the Sandisk drive, in fact, only contains one bit of data per memory cell. Sandisk makes NAND flash that can hold two bits of data per cell and, through Msystems, has technology for expanding that to four bits of memory in a cell. Increasing the capacity can thus be accomplished without massive technological breakthroughs. NAND pricing has also been dropping rapidly. Meanwhile, drive makers point out that hard drives also continue to increase in data density and are far less expensive. Hitachi executives have said drives that can hold a terabyte of data are on the horizon. Internet video will choke flash. An hour of standard video gobbles up about 1GB, while an hour of high-definition video will take up 4GB, according to various estimates. "Right now, the average notebook shipment drive we're shipping is 80 gigabytes, and it's growing about 7 or 8 gigabytes a quarter," Seagate Technology CEO Bill Watkins said in an interview in November. "If you talk to an Apple or Dell or HP or someone like that, they're going to tell you in 2010, 2011 they're looking for the average notebook to be more like 250GB, because there is going to be a lot of content. How is flash going to get there?"
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