Sandisk’s 32GB Flash Drive – Cheaper Than Expected March 14, 2007
Read more Gadgets , Gizmodo UK , Laptops , PC , Peripherals , Storage , Technology
Intel yesterday and now Sandisk today. We know that Flash drives will play an increasingly important roll in laptops as the year rolls on and we also know that they’ll cost you your first born child. Sandisk has just announced its 32GB solid state drive (SSD) for laptops and indications are that the drive could cost a lot less than previously thought.
The new 2.5in SSD which can be used as a drop-in replacement for hard drives in laptops will cost under £200, approximately. OK, this is helluva lot more than you’d pay for current hard drive technology [£6 per Flash Gb versus 40p per regualr Gb] but it’s less than originally thought. So what’s the big deal?
According to Sandisk the drive can boot Windows Vista Enterprise in about 30 seconds and read and write data to the drive 100 times faster than existing drives. It’s also nicer to your battery and runs silent.
The price rules it out for the majority of us but more of these Flash drives are coming this year [Cebit starts tomorrow, after all] and I expect that this technology will become affordable to a greater number of us laptop junkies in 2008. Hopefully.-Martin Lynch
Editor and Contributor | Martin Lynch
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Comments
not only laptops. i guess when iphone comes out 4 and 8 gigs may not be enough for some people... 32gig iphone would be nice...
(ps really sorry for the spam, but check out the the iphone news site for hot news...)
I thought flash memory could I only be written over a ceratin amount of times ? I know its very high amount but doesnt that mean that all these drives will one day just start messing up, esp since Id bet windows will write to it thousands of times in one session?
Flash chips keep track of how many times each cell is used, and then stops using it when its reached its limit. So in theory the usable space on the drive will reduce, but I think this limit is so large, its not normally met.