AnandTech has put together a review of one of the first “Solid State Drives” (SSD) aka a hard drive made up of flash memory. It’s the 16GB Super Talent SSD16GB25/25M Flash Drive, from Super Talent. They get into the history of solid state/flash-based drives, mention that Samsung and Sandisk have released or are released SSDs as well, and point out that SSDs use less power, are silent, and aren’t prone to problems that normal disc/platter based hard drives are when dropped. For an ultraportable laptops or other similar computing device where weight, size, and battery life are factors, SSDs will probably one day become standard. Dell and other manufacturers are already starting to offer SSDs as options for some laptops.
They also point out something else that’s interesting – these drives can handle 10 years of normal usage without failure, due to their construction. That’s very interesting. Price is going to be the deciding factor at this point, as Anandtech points out – until the price drops quite a bit, these won’t be standard.