Flash Memory Laptops On the Horizon

[Roger]

Today Samsung announced that is has developed 32 GB and 64 GB CompactFlash cards, which moves solid-state notebook flash memory closer toreality. The actual announcement is full of techno-jargon that won't be of much interest, but the breakthrough is significant.

Rumors of solid-state laptops have been swirling for a while now, butreaching the proper storage capacities has been the holdup. Theoretically, PC makers could be building flash memory and standardhard drives into notebook PCs within a year or two. The flash memory would beused to store and run the operating system while the standard harddrive would be used by you as always--for game, music, movie, photo,and document storage. Without requiring this hard drive to also handleOS duties, the computer would run much faster and more efficiently interms of battery usage.

A potential endgame for notebook PCs down the road is that disk-basedhard drives will disappear in favor of superhuge flash memory drives,but we're still a long time from that even being possible. Listen to more about this via a report on NPR.

--Posted by Chris B

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