CNET published an interview by Michael Kanellos, with Micron Technology’s CEO, Steve Appleton, in which a few things concerning NAND/Flash memory and notebooks were brought up. Of great interest to our part of the laptop world:
CNET: So you’re saying that in a few years, we could have notebooks with 30GB or 40GB of NAND, and that’s it for storage?
Appleton: Yeah, of course. I’m not saying drives will go away. There will always be a need for storage……There’ll always be an application for high-density (drives).Now let me throw this at you. How would like your battery life to be 15 to 20 hours?
CNET: On your notebook? Sure, why not?
Appleton: Solid state is huge for battery life. Also, by the way, you can get rid of the stupid log-on sequence. What if there was just instant access? What if the access time was, you know 50 nanoseconds instead of–I don’t know how many milliseconds it takes to go out on a drive, but it’s quite a while.
Even putting aside the 15-20 hour battery life, if you cut the power requirements way down by going with NAND, you could cut your battery size and weight substantially, allowing for an even smaller/lighter ultraportable – a lot of us would be happy with half the battery size and weight if we had 8 hours of battery life.