Solid State Drives are making progress

I am intrigued by last week's Newsbyte announcing 64GB Flash-based SSDs. Does this herald an era of laptops with no moving parts, greater longevity and longer battery operation? Red Winters

Possibly. You can already buy solid-state disks (SSDs) as drop-in replacements for conventional hard drives. The main problems are capacity and price. Dell started offering SanDisk's 32GB SSD in the US in April for its Latitude D420 ultra-portables and D620 ATG notebooks. (The Dell part number is 341-4872.) However, whereas an 80GB drive costs around $80 (£40), Dell's 32GB SanDisk SSD costs $494, or $15.44 per gigabyte. Not many people want to add up to $500 to the cost of a notebook PC to get less storage space. SSDs will continue to get bigger and cheaper, but so will traditional hard drives.