Dell goes solid state come June 2007

According to Dell Singapore’s spokesperson, the new range of Latitude notebooks will start offering solid state and hybrid harddisks in the business-centric L attitude series to Asia come June 2007.

The new Santa Rosa laptops are not merely refresh models of its existing lineup. The chassis has been toughened with magnesium-alloy materials, and the standard-aspect display goes widescreen in its 2007 business range. Offering the flash-based hard drive solution can only increase data integrity, as the solid state memory is more drop resistant than its mechanical counterpart. The first wave of flash-based Latitudes will likely include a 32GB storage option, not enough for multimedia users, but sufficient for productivity users.

Unfortunately, solid state technology is still in its infancy and hence rather expensive. A hybrid drive uses traditional magnetic technology coupled with a 512MB flash component. The latter acts as a fast buffer for accessing the contents of the storage platter. Hybrid drives would likely be offered at a premium over normal harddisks, but certainly a lot cheaper than flash-based solutions.

Cool! One of the bottlenecks in computing has been the speed of the hard drive, especially for laptops, so these new solid-state harddisks should speed things up significantly — but I wonder how much it’ll cost.

At least things are advancing. I wasn’t expecting the implementation of these new hard drives to come so soon actually. June’s pretty much next month - I was expecting a year or two at least.

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