http://www.foxbusiness.com/personal-finance/innovation/article/innovation-new-storage-tech-extends-life-laptops_387889_57.htmlNew Computer Storage Tech Extends Life of Laptops
Donna Fuscaldo
FOXBusiness
Go ahead, drop that laptop. Just make sure it has a solid-state drive inside.
The laptop-computer market could get a lift thanks to new storage technology that promises near-instant boot-up time, longer battery life and way more durability--for those willing to plunk down the extra cash.
Long a promise but starting to roll out in laptops made by the likes of Dell Inc. (DELL), Sony Corp. (SNE) and Toshiba -- and pretty soon just about every other PC maker -- these solid-state drives have no moving parts. That means they can take much more of a beating then the current laptops on the market. According to Craig Marking, senior product marketing manager at Toshiba, hard drives spin at a rate of 52.5 miles per hour.
It also means you won’t have to wait minutes for you laptop to start up and shut down, nor will it take time for applications to load. Laptop batteries could end up lasting 10% to 15% longer or about an extra hour and will run a lot cooler and quieter.
“With a hard drive you have moving parts,’’ said Michael Abary, senior VP of marketing for Sony’s Vaio line of notebooks, which is already selling a notebook computer with a solid-state drive. “With a solid-state drive, there’s no moving parts, therefore the chance of failure is infinitely less. We are seeing that solid-state notebooks are being used in mission-critical situations.”
With an extra cost of anywhere from $500 to $900 for the solid-state drives, industry watchers don’t think these drives will ever replace the current hard drives on the market. In addition to the price difference, current hard drives have much bigger storage capacity, likely rendering solid-state drives to a niche, at least in the beginning.
Solid-state drives today have a capacity of 64GB while their hard-disk brethren have capacities of 250GB and higher.
“It's unlikely hard disk drives will go away,’’ said Michael Yang, flash marketing manager at Samsung Electronics, which makes solid-state drives and other computer-memory products. For most of the market, 64GB is good enough, but there will always be people who need more, Yang said, pointing as an example to consumers that have a ton of digital movies or songs stored on their computers.
According to Samsung, next year solid-state drives will make up 10% of the computer market. That will grow to 20% to 30% in 2009 and 50% in 2010 as the price for the drives come down. “Over time there will be a happy medium,’’ said Yang.
Given the extra price and newness of the technology, computer makers are targeting solid-state drives at corporations, early tech adopters and road warriors. Since the solid-state drives have a lower failure rate, industry players argue that, while more costly, they will end up saving a corporation more money over the long run. Yang of Samsung said with solid-state drives you get 2 million hours before failure compared with 300,000 hours with regular hard drives.
Samsung is currently working with an unnamed pharmaceutical company whose notebook computers out in the field have an average life span of about a year. By having solid-state drives, the company is able to reduce the number of hours spent fixing or replacing the laptops, said Yang. “The most appealing factor is cheaper total cost of ownership,’’ he said.
On the consumer side, executives at the computer companies say it will mainly be early technology adopters and computer gamers that find the technology appealing enough to pay the extra cash.
“When the iPhone came out, there were certain people who had to have it because it was innovative and cool,” said Marking. That’s the type of people who would want solid-state drives, he said.
I also see this as a good thing for Tablet PCs like the Motion Computing tablets and other ultra portables.
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