Laptops to Eliminate Spinning Hard Drives?

Following up on Sony's announcement of a 32GB solid state drive (SSD) option in its new Vaio Type-G line, Dell yesterday announced the availability of an SSD option its Latitude D420 and D620 notebooks.

The idea behind SSD is that, with solid state technology, the notebooks break before the drives do. They are twice as resilient to force and sudden impacts than a standard HDD platter. Dell has performed impact tests to arrive at this 2x durability number. The other advantages include a more silent system, the reduction of heat in the chassis and, of course, a notable reduction in size.

The 1.8-inch 32GB SanDisk SSD, tha  was announced by SanDisk in January, is said to increase read/write performance by up to 23 percent. Dell claims SDD is over three and a half times less likely to fail compared with the drives currently available for the Latitude notebooks. Due to size constraints, the best fit for this technology right now seems to be as a replacement for the 40GB drives found in ultra-portables.

So how much will this security and peace of mind set you back? A cool $549 retail - the same price markup offered by Sony on it's systems. The option is available in Dell's build-to-order system. Currently the drive is already available in North and South America. SSD availability in Europe and Asia was unannounced as of this time.

For more information, please visit www.sandisk.com.