There aren’t any pricing details yet (at least not in this Inquirer story), but Samsung will be offering solid-state hard drives in sizes up to 16GB. What this means to you is lighter laptops, with greater battery life (although only about a 10 percent increase; I would have expected more), and faster read/write speeds. It also means laptops with the drives—which are the standard 1.8-inch form factor of other laptop drives (Update: Er, not-so-standard; 2.5-inch is ‘laptop-sized,’ while 1.8-inch is ‘iPod-sized.’ Thanks, Ben!)—will be entirely solid-state, making them less succeptable to impact and shock damage (optical drives, notwithstanding).
There was a time, say about a decade ago, when it was predicted that everyone would be using these flash-memory drives storage, but it’s taken this long for flash memory to reach a price point where it is a practical option.
Samsung ready to release 16GB solid state hard drives [TheInquirer]
