Really Hard Drives

Last March, Samsung launched a 32GB solid-state disk. A couple of weeks ago, TDK followed suit with their own offering. Unfortunately, these solid-state drives, as far as I can tell, are still prototypes.   The best feature of these drives, at least in my opinion, is durability. With no moving parts, solid-state drives are much less prone to damage from drops than current drives. Laptop drives, I hear, are more rugged than their desktop-bound cousins - but these babies are in a different class altogether. Like thumb drives and memory cards, you can toss these around without fear of losing data. If you think that's cool on a laptop, imagine having one of these drives in an iPod or any other DAP. I would get on a bike or go running with a flash-based MP3 player like the Nano, but I wouldn't dare do that with the larger hard drive based players. I wouldn't mind getting a large iPod for my complete music collection and a flash-based player for rough use, but a player with a large solid-state drive gives me the best of both worlds. I bet its battery will last longer too. Yes, another effect of having no moving parts is efficiency. They sip juice from batteries ever so slowly - supposedly consuming less than 10% of what current drives use. When these drives (as well as other technologies) come out, maybe we can start seeing laptops that run for weeks on a single charge.