When can we expect "solid state" Flash hard drives of a reasonable size and price in the computer world? I know they exist in the military world. Ken Hickford
People have been predicting the death of hard drives for more than a decade, but mechanical drive manufacturers have kept making astonishing advances. Samsung has launched a 32GB Flash drive, and forecast that a third of notebook PCs would use solid state hard drives by 2008. The advantages of SSDs (solid state drives) include speed, low weight, low power requirements, small size, and resilience -- they tend not to break if you drop them.
The problem is that, assuming Flash memory chips cost $20 per gigabyte, 32GB would still cost $640 -- about £340. You could get up to 700GB of conventional hard drive storage for that sort of money. However, when solid state hard drives do become commercially viable for general use, you'll see them advertised in ultra-mobile PCs, where light weight and low power requirements command premium prices.
