Dell Offers SSD Notebooks

By Greg McNevin

April 26, 2007: Dell has become one of the first mainstream PC vendors to offer solid state disks (SSDs) in its laptops, bundling a 32GB SanDisk drive in its ultraportable Latitude D420 and the semi-rugged D620 ATG.

The announcement follows Fujitsu’s move to include 16GB and 32GB Samsung SSD’s in its business notebooks earlier this year. Samsung also demonstrated an SSD powered notebook last year, while Apple is rumoured to be bringing out an ultraportable sub-notebook using the technology.

While NAND flash memory SSDs are still considerably more expensive than traditional magnetic storage (in the realms of 10x more per gigabyte), with companies such as Dell taking up the technology the price gap should rapidly close.

“A solid state drive is an excellent storage technology for our mobile users,” said Dell CTO Kevin Kettler. “We are committed to leading the industry in delivering these new drives and will offer them across Dell’s next generation of Latitude products.”

The move by SSD technology out of the high-end military and scientific research market has been a long time coming, but with benefits such as dramatically increased speed, low power consumption and heat, and improved ruggedness it will no doubt be welcomed by all.

“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 SanDisk CEO Eli Harari. “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.”

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