flash drive based powerbooks?

[law guy]

Macworld UK has comments from Samsund talking about large capacity flash drives in the next few years - up to 100 mb [edit: er... GB] - and what the intersection of falling prices with larger size may mean for hard drives. Link: http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=11927

Interesting possibility! Would these be much faster than the current crop of ATA spinning drives?

 

[yoda13]

100 mb isn't very much....lol

this is interesting, don't know what to make of it, but it is interesting.

 

[law guy]

100 mb isn't very much....lol

this is interesting, don't know what to make of it, but it is interesting.

Good catch - 100 GB, of course. Perhaps subconciously my mind couldn't accept a flash drive of that size and auto-corrected... or I'm just typo-prone.

"This will be big once people enjoy how much faster and convenient it is to use solid-state disks rather than hard-disk drives," Hwang said. "We're starting with 16GB and expanding to 100GB in a couple of years."

 

[MacDawg]

My Mac II had a 100 MB hard drive
Still have it by the way, with an 030 processor upgrade in it

Woof, Woof - Dawg

 

[Eniregnat]

Wow, a Mac that would something I would want in a PB. Solid state drives are so robust. No moveing parts, reduced weight, but increased cost. I'd pay the premium.

 

[law guy]

My Mac II had a 100 MB hard drive
Still have it by the way, with an 030 processor upgrade in it

Woof, Woof - Dawg

Now that reminds me of the 40 MB SCSI drive in my IIsi. Which reminds me of one of Apple's other "switches" from SCSI to ATA b/c they were more common and cheaper, and the clones like PowerComputing pushed that direction. It wouldn't suck to have 3.2 ms, 15,000 RPM as the std equipment in Macs today. That was an Apple switch to a slower, but cheaper technology... oh, but I digress.

 

[MacTruck]

Flash is too slow. Never happen.

 

[eXan]

Aren't flash drives much slower than HDs?

 

[law guy]

Flash is too slow. Never happen.

MacTruck - so is the Samsung CEO making a misleading statement on them being "faster"? I really don't know - I assume that static memory is faster given we all love RAM more than our HDs.

 

[Linkjeniero]

MacTruck - so is the Samsung CEO making a misleading statement on them being "faster"? I really don't know - I assume that static memory is faster given we all love RAM more than our HDs.

There are various kinds of static memory, and flash memory is UBER SLOW compared to RAM (that's why we use RAM, even though it has the disadvantage of needing a constant supply of electricity to keep the data stored, unlike the Flash memory). But I don't think the Samsung CEO would be lying there, so maybe they are reaching a point where Flash is catching up in speed with HDs (and capacity as well). Imagine a 12" widescreen Powerbook with a fanless Pentium M, and no moving HD... that think would be really small, thin, quiet, cold, and the battery would last forever... I can't wait to see it

 

[topicolo]

I think the addition of a flash hard drive is entirely possible for the powerbooks, since Apple won't be likely to introduce very many improvements in terms of processors for its portables due to craptacular G4 improvements. Instead, I think Apple will look at other aspects to improve their portable offerings (like brighter and higher resolution screens, more ram, exotic technologies like the flash hard disk, etc)