At the beginning of March, I posted an item about how Intel was planning to start supporting NAND memory in notebooks. Now comes word that Samsung has unveiled a 32GB notebook hard drive based entirely on NAND Flash memory. The benefits are many: Flash memory read data three times faster, writes data 1.5 times faster, uses significantly less power, is free of mechanical parts and weighs about half of a comparable hard drive.
Before you decide that this will be your next notebook, there is one big stumbling block. With a price of $50 USD per gigabyte, Samsung’s 32GB drive would cost $1600 USD. Flash memory will need to come down further to make this a more worthwhile proposition.