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Samsung Wants To Make Your Notebook Lighter, More Energy Efficient, And, Oh Yeah, More Expensive
Computers | Mar 24, 06
Samsung is touting a new NAND flash-memory chipset for notebook computers, which, with its 32 GB storage capacity, is meant to replace the ubiquitous hard drive. At fifteen grams, its less than a third of the weight of a hard drive, and of course flash uses a lot less juice than spinning a disk, so the new technology could extend battery time between battery charges.
However, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Samsung intends to market this chipset for $200-$250 in 2008, while even today hard drives with twice the capacity are available for around 25% of this price. So you'd be giving up a lot of storage and green to save those extra grams, and current laptop batteries can already get you through a transatlantic flight filled with the joy of spreadsheets and Word documents. The value proposition here may not be compelling enough to get laptop manufacturers to dump their hard drives in a flash.
Posted by jeffrey.trester (Permalink)
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An article in the IEEE Spectrum discusses the differences between flash memory and magnetic memory hard drives. The bottom line is that for the foreseable future, flash memory will continue to be much more expensive than magnetic HD memory. Whether or not flash memory will end up being used in laptops as the main permanent storage system really depends on the rate of advance of software. If software storage needs grow slowly, then eventually everyting a user needs can be effectively saved to a flash memory device, since the price of storage of all kinds - magnetic disks and flash memory - declines every year. If software storage size and performance needs grow quickly enough, then flash will remain an inadequate option for this need.
To learn about the different kinds of flash memory, such as NAND, you can start at the Wikipedia article. To find out what kind of flash memory is actually being used in the consumer market, start at the PriceSCAN flash memory page.
- The Ambassador -
Posted by: The Ambassador at March 24, 2006 6:48 PM
