Ok, so we just posted about LEDs providing backlight to LCD screens in laptops and the potential for increasing battery life in systems. Now consider what it might mean to have a flash-based hard drive (or drives) in your laptop. How much more life might we eek out of the battery and how much less heat might the system produce without moving parts? Thanks to SanDisk, we’ll find out soon enough.

I’d heard rumors about flash-based hard drives before but now ZD-Net UK has posted a piece on SanDisk’s new product. These are 32GB solid-state drives, and if SanDisk is to be believed, blazingly fast.

In its own tests, SanDisk says its flash drive can boot up WindowsVista — the next version of the Windows operating system — in 35seconds, 28 seconds faster than the 55-second boot-up time requiredwith a conventional drive.

ZD-Net was quick to point out that the drives will cost about $600 initially but if we compare this to the initial cost of flash drives when they first came out and what they run now, I would venture that the cost of these drives will fall substantially as they gain a mass market.
They also mentioned that hard drive manufacturers were claiming that flash based drives were no threat to their market, but has anyone reminded them that in only a few years flash drives have grown from 16MB to 32GB?

technorati tags:flash, drive, laptop

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