32GB flash disk enables solid-state notebook

The era of the solid-state notebook came a step closer to today with the announcement by Samsung of a 32GB flash drive that can take the place of a hard disk.

The 15g solid-state disk (SSD) uses Nand flash and is only a quarter the weight of a 1.8in hard drive, but reads data three times faster and writes 1.5 times faster while using a twentieth of the electrical power.

It also has the advantages of being silent, having no moving parts, and is more robust than a disk drive.

Samsung would not give any pricing after the announcement at the Mobile Solution event in Taiwan, but with flash costing around £17 per GB the memory cost alone would be around £540.

The price of Nand flash is expect to fall by around half over the next three years, though even this would still make it far more expensive per gigabyte than hard-disk storage.