Samsung Electronics announced this year it will begin manufacturing 16 gigabyte flash drives.
The aim of this move is to attempt to replace the traditional mechanical hard-drives in notebook computers with the flash drives to improve both battery life and durability. The solid state device will have many positive effects on the devices included shorter boot times; faster disk access and overall reducing the weight of the unit.
Flash Memory (NAND) is currently found in many products where space and power usage are crucial, key sized USB drives and digital cameras are but two. Increases in capacity will soon rival hard disks and DVDs as a mass storage medium.
Joe Unsworth of analyst Gartner commented,
"I do think there's a role for Nand Flash in PCs, but for the foreseeable future, hard disks have cost advantages."
Gartner estimates that 16GB Flash drives will cost from about £50 ($90) in 2007 but with Windows Vista is likely to require much larger capacities hard drives will still be necessary. Other possible situations see Flash drives operating along side hard-disks acting as cache for frequently access applications reducing hard drive activity therefore increasing battery life.
Several chip manufacturers have also show an interest in Flash mediums, notably Intel have plans on using Flash technology on chipsets to accelerate performance.
This article was submitted by guest writer, James Szabo
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