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Dell Drives Into Solid State Storage |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Sunday, 29 April 2007 |
Leading laptop computer maker, Dell, has announced a move into solid
state disk drive technology heralding the first steps toward a new era
in mobile computing.
While smaller laptop makers like Sony and Samsung are also making moves
toward solid state technology, the announcement by Dell is more
significant because of the number of machines the company sells and its
penetration into corporate buying departments could see far more rapid
adoption of the new technology.
Though for the moment, only the wealthy willing to pay dearly for the
increased performance offered by the new storage devices are likely
customers for the SanDisk drives which add more than US$500 to the
price of a laptop computer.
Dell says it has started offering a 1.8-inch 32GB solid state drive
(SSD) on its Latitude D420 ultra-mobile and D620 ATG semi-rugged
notebooks, initially, but has committed to offering them as an option
across next generation Latitude notebooks because they enable better
reliability, increased performance and noise reduction.
Unlike a traditional HDD, the solid state 'disk' drive technology
relies on flash memory instead of spinning disks covered in magnetic
material.
As the SSDs use no moving parts they have far lower failure rates making them suitable for Dell's semi-rugged notebook line.
Engineering tests show that the SSD has an operating shock tolerance of
up to 1,300 Gs, which is twice the rating of mechanical drives. In
fact, during extreme impact testing the surrounding notebook hardware
breaks before the drive. In addition, the drives are predicted to
reduce the probability of failure by three-and-one-half times compared
to standard mechanical drives.
The high speed of the silicon storage is also a great advantage not
only at boot time, but also in storage-intensive uses such as
database-driven applications. The new drives can also increase system
performance by up to 23 percent and decreases boot time by up to 34
percent compared to traditional HDDs available with the Latitude D420
and D620 ATG.
"This represents an important milestone in the evolution of personal
computers with the arrival of solid state flash memory as a durable,
efficient alternative to the hard drive," said Eli Harari, SanDisk's
founder and CEO.
"For those enterprise road warriors who rely on their notebook PCs,
hard drive crashes with attendant loss of critical data will soon be a
thing of the past. We're delighted that Dell has chosen the SanDisk SSD
to launch this technology into their line of mobile PCs."
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