Now from Dell--the $920 hard drive

Consumers can now buy a notebook from Dell or its Alienware division that contains a 64GB hard drive made from flash memory.

And the upgrade will only cost you $920.

Dell is expanding its options for notebooks with drives built around flash memory. Earlier this year, the company began to sell a 32GB flash drive from Samsung as an upgrade option on some notebooks. This week, it has officially begun to sell Samsung's 64GB drive. You can swap out a regular hard drive for a 32GB or 64GB flash drive on the Dell XPS 1330 consumer notebook or get a 32GB or 64GB solid state drive on the Alienware Area 51 m9750 notebook. Alienware will also sell you a notebook with two 64GB drives in it to bring the total to 128GB.

The Alienware Area-51 m9750.

Flash memory drives are faster in some respects than traditional hard drives and are more durable, but they do cost more. They also hold less too.

How big is the discrepancy? The standard configuration of the Alienware notebook comes with a 160GB drive and costs $2,280. Swapping that out for a 32GB drive adds $320 to the price. So that's 1/5th the storage for $320 more.

Swapping in the 64GB drive adds $920 to the price. Again--less storage, but now your notebook costs $3,200.

You get a break on the dual 64GB configuration. That only adds $1,220 to the entire price. And at 128GB, you're almost at where you started.

But, hey, the miraculous declines in price in the flash world are busy at work. When I first checked this morning, the 64GB drive cost $1,000 more. See what prices you get.

The configuration details for the XPS weren't available when I checked.

One of the odd parts of this announcement is that Dell is marketing solid state drives to consumers. Samsung and SanDisk execs (as well as Seagate execs) have said that solid state drives are probably mostly interesting to corporate buyers, who use less storage space than consumers. (Consumers are expected to chew up a lot of disk space with video.)

Corporate users also could see a lot more benefits. Boot-up time is much shorter with flash drives. Microsoft Outlook comes up rapidly--it doesn't take seven minutes. A Samsung exec showed me this and I thought it was a faked demo. Nope, he said. He uses a flash notebook at work, and co-workers like to come by and see the Outlook trick. Notebook makers in the future will also cut out some of the bulk on their notebooks when shifting to flash. Flash takes less room.

Dell added that later in the year it expects to come out with flash-based drive options for its corporate notebooks and portable workstations.

[lorcro2000]

Hipness doesn't enter into it

It's way past time for us to get rid of nasty mechanical rotating platters in our computers. Right now, yes, flash is pricier, but things are just ramping up.

Moving parts are just a bad idea all round. Hard drives are fragile, generate heat and noise and in general are just slow and nasty - to the ponit where they drag the performance of the entire computer down with them. I'm amazed we've kept them as long as we have - but the manufacturers really stepped up and tweaked the heck out of them to keep them competitive.

For the time being they're still the only game in town for really large data volumes. Hopefully though some really bright guy will come up with an option that is even better than flash... but until he does, flash is a lot better than drives.

[WDS2]

Drives versus flash

There was a time when you could run a system without a hard drive (heck, I once had a system with FOUR floppy drives!) and I have no doubt that someday flash will catch up to hardrives and make them obsolete too. But it will still be a while with drives pushing past 1,000 GB now and digital photography eating up drive space so fast. Could you even install Windows on a 32 GB drive? I'll be generous and make it Windows XP?

[NickH]

7 minutes to open Outlook?

If your Outlook takes 7 minutes to open, that deserves an article of its own.

Mine opens in just a couple of seconds.

[michael kanellos]

exaggeration for humorous effect

Actually, it takes at least a minute every day for me. Still quite aggravating. I always thought it was a network issue, but apparently it can be helped by switching to flash.

[inachu]

I have seen outlook take 15 minutes to open.

the OS was a fresh new install.
MS office was the only application installed.

Never could figure it out and the pc has 1 gig of ram.

even a defrag did not fix it.

I thinik maybe a windowsupdate killed it.

[roger.d.miller]

"it doesn't take seven minutes to open"

"Microsoft Outlook comes up rapidly--it doesn't take seven minutes to open"

Your computer is a sick puppy!

Malware? Botnet? Michael need some professional help.

[ubnyan]

the Outlook trick?

I think we are going away from the actual article but 7 minutes for Outlook to start?? 'Cmon! Mine takes a second or less to open. Mike may need a new laptop (with a 64GB flash drive) or maybe once again he's been a victim of an electronic privacy attack(2003) that slowed down his Outlook.... :O

[bitsplice]

Load Leveling

My concern about using Flash memory is that there are a finite number of writes to a particular memory cell. Depending on the file system on the drive, for example, a FAT32 system has a special place (called the File Allocation Table) for saving the state of the file system and has to be be changed anytime a file is written to. This will wear out that section of the flash in a short amount of time. This can be compensated by load leveling (moving newly written data to a different area in the flash), but that can cause other problems, like if the computer hangs before the FAT is safely written.

[Tsee-1968031069905097881578618]

I've seen Outlook open in 10 minutes

But an article like this would do well with a performance review. That would answer the question: is it worth it.

[groink_hi]

Number of writes limit?

I always thought that there was a limit on the number of writes you can perform on a single block of space on a flash device. Maybe this is old information that has since then been fixed. Back then, it was an issue with Windows - as it is known to perform a ton of caching operations using the system drive. I'll still afraid of using flash technology of this size, as I was taught to use flash for temporary storage, such as storing photos via a card, or files via a thumb drive.

[PromptJock]

Correct, Grasshopper!

groink is correct: flash memory ** DOES INDEED ** have a limited write-cycle life. When flash first arrived on the scene, it was limited to a mere TEN-THOUSAND (10,000) write and erase/write cycles. Granted, flash technology has improved since it was introduced on the market, but it's still has a limited write-life (maybe 100,000 write-cycles now? still less than a standard magnetic drive!).

What does this mean? simply this: that $920 64G drive, under "typical" use, may only last 6 months or so! after that, it's time for another new drive (who knows how much they'll cost or their capacities in 6 months). Furthermore, it translates to a whopping $14+/Gigabyte, compared to less than $1/gigabyte for a comparable magnetic drive.

FWIW, 20 years ago I remember a company created a 4 megabyte SOLID-STATE DRIVE, using DYNAMIC SIMM modules, that had a base price of $1995 with NO MEMORY! at that time, 4 megabytes of SIMMs (in 256 kilobyte increments!), cost as much as the drive chassis (IOW, $4000 for a 4 megabyte solid-state dynamic memory drive). Unfortunately, that drive DID NOT have any sort of "battery backup" in it, so if it lost power - the data on it went "POOF!!"

Therefore, what is the conclusion? this is a REAL BAD DEAL regarding "bang for buck" and similar economic issues regarding computers. However, those who really want something like this should remember to BACK-UP YOUR DATA TO AN EXTERNAL USB2 MAGNETIC DRIVE AT LEAST ** ONCE A DAY **! that way, when the flash drive goes "POOF!!", and if you've done your backup, you'll at least have the USB2 drive to work with while you decide if you want to $hell out the buck$ for anotehr flash drive.

[groink_hi]

Usual reason for Outlook starting up slow...

is when you have cache mode enabled. So if you have a ton of data stored on your Exchange server (mail, calendar, tasks, GALs, etc.) your Outlook config must download the data that's missing from your cache files (OST). That's probably why it speeds up when you switch to flash, but I wouldn't call this a solution to startup performance like this. As always Microsoft recommends boosting your hardware than for them to optimize their software. Cache mode should really only be used by portable users who need to perform network-based Outlook functions while disconnected from the corporate LAN.

[E B]

Portable users...

Portable users...like those who might be using, say, a LAPTOP computer?