Samsung have developed a solid state drive packing 32GB of memory in the same size case as a 1.8" hard-disk drive. Under demonstration, the SSD (Solid-state Disk) in comparison with a HDD (Hard Disk Drive) booted up from start 20 seconds faster.

The advantage of an SSD is that it has faster access to data, the drive has far greater durability with no moving parts withstanding far greater shock than a HDD, and the SSD works absolutely silently. However, at the present time a HDD is far less expensive than the SSD which at the present costs USD55 per GB.

Rather than seeing SSDs in laptops right now, it looks more likely that high-end phones and music playing devices will be the beneficiary of these larger capacity SSDs. SSDs of any significant sizes will be a major part of a laptop by 2009 it is predicted.

As I go through a laptop about every two to three years, having just purchased a sub $2,000 notebook, it looks like my next purchase around 2009 will most likely be sporting a good sized SSD rather than a HDD.