Fancy meeting you, here!
Apple may sell notebook computers later this year that use the same type of fast memory as music players and digital cameras, driving down prices of hard disk drives, an analyst said today. In a separate report, LG Electronics is also said to be planning the release of a laptop this month that uses a hybrid drive.
The laptop news comes in the same week that Samsung Electronics announced it was shipping its first so-called hybrid drive, which uses a combination of nonvolatile NAND flash memory and magnetic spinning disk to save on power consumption and boot-up time.
Online sources stated that LG is ready to ship its R400 laptop over the next couple of weeks using a hybrid drive. The R400 laptop comes with a 14-inch LCD screen and Bluetooth capability.
We’re sitting in the middle of a geek whirlwind. We’ll probably hear from Toshiba before the month is out.
With a 4gig thumb drive selling for $30 no rebate, you think it wouldn’t be long for laptops to have flash memory hard drive. All I can say is bring it on.
Que the people who will complain because flash memory has a limited write cycle.
It depends on how easy it is to remove/replace the 100% flash disk.
Also if done right, a 4g flash drive is actually 12g in a Raid-5 config, meaning you triple the write cycle and at least double the read speed.
These things have been available for a while now on SCSI bus.
… We’re sitting in the middle of a geek whirlwind … yep.
Has the DATABASE ERROR in Cage Match been fixed yet?????
Meanwhile, this implementation will beat the flash-on-the-drive concept.
#3
You know how Apple is, chances are that just because the laptop is extra pretty, it’s going to take you and hour to gut the entire machine just to replace the Flash disk.
Hi ! I’m a Mac…
… and I’m an LG…
#6,
You forgot that you will need special tools to service the Mac as well. Well that is when the parts are not glued together. Gotta love that industrial design.
#8
And don’t you dare tell others how to fix them or you’ll get a cease and desist letter from Apple’s lawyers.
Poor Angel, Greg and (soon to arrive) Pedro. All that gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair. Over nothing, really. You are just as free to void your warranty with Apple as you are with any other computer manufacturer. An orange stick cost about $2 at any hardware store, a No. 00 Philips screwdriver is $3.50 at Sears. Now, cease and desist, Apple bashers.
11. I’m resisting my (IMHO tottally justified) bashing urge (after all I own three Macs, so it’s legit to bash…).
But as far as portables go, Apple’s offerings are a pain-in-the-royal-butt to service. Never think of replacing HD. And Ram is much more choosey than PCs.
OTOH I’d welcome a portable with no HD, but flash ram disk, and an array of memory cards slots.
1 Gig seems to be the bare minimum SD card these days and 4 gigs are cheap enough, so I could populate those slots with whatever card I choose.
Anyway, I don’t think the HD goes away right now. At least not until we can get 20 Gb SD cards for 39.99….
Anybody here remember the orignal NEC UltraLite, the first laptop? It was all solid state, no moving parts to speak of outside the hinges and keyboard. I had one shortly after it came out. It ran DOS installed in, I forget, eeprom maybe, and only had a ramdisk for work files. To get files back off the computer took a serial port connection, if I recall correctly. Sure was handy, though, for taking notes or writing on-the-fly stuff. At a COMDEX in 1997 or so people at the NEC booth spotted my wife wandering around with it – they’d been trying to find one for an NEC museum they planned to set up, and the tech was moving so fast in those years, the original UltraLites had mostly long since disappeared. The NEC people traded her a brand new NEC laptop for the UltraLite, and she left the proud owner of a 133MHz machine with a hard drive and a floppy. It ran Windows 95. She still uses that 133 running Windows 95 – doesn’t want a new one.
If that original UltraLite from the late 1980s had had a floppy drive for file storage, it would have been a much bigger hit than it was. Maybe Apple and LG will get an all-solid-state laptop right with the newer tech. It’ll be an interesting market free-for-all for a time, I bet.