SanDisk is looking to replace that spinning, power-hungry hard drive in your laptop with a 1.8-inch solid state 32GB flash drive. The company says its cool-running SSD Ultra ATA 5000 1.8" drive is a drop-in replacement for those old-fashioned mechanical hard disks. It packs the performance, too, with a 62MB-per-second read speed while using less than half the battery power of conventional discs.

Its most impressive spec is its random read rate of 7300 inputs and outputs per second, 100 times faster than most hard disks, letting the thing boot Microsoft Windows Vista in 35 seconds. That's about 28 seconds faster than a garden-variety hard disk can do. It's much smaller than the 2.5-inch 32GB flash drive Samsung introduced last March, but it's still rather pricey, adding around $600 to a laptop in which it resides. Going out to equipment manufacturers now, the company says we'll be seeing notebooks with this drive inside by the middle of this year. – Charlie White

Product Page [SanDisk, via Tracy and Matt's]

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