Samsung’s Flash memory Harddrive – Windows Vista Only

The Register is reporting that Samsung and Microsoft will have a demonstration of Samsung’s new Flash-based harddrive here in a few weeks at WinHEC (Windows Hardware Engineering Conference). Flash-based harddrives have a lot of advantages – especially in the area of durability, but the initial expense will be one of the largest hurdles to widespread adaptation (there are technical hurdles, but by the time these things are ready to ship, those should be overcome).

It looks like Microsoft Windows Vista will be the first Operating System to support such storage, so it’ll be a while before anybody sees these drives in production machines.

Project Fusion and Maxtor Portable Drives

LAPTOP Magazine is reporting on Maxtor’s announcement of two external harddrives, as well as a new web-based application, “Project Fusion” to manage data stored on them and/or transferred back and forth. Of interest to portable users is the Maxtor OneTouch III Mini ($149 – 60GB, $199 – 100GB) which is “small enough to fit in the palm of your hand“.

Added into the mix is “Project Fusion”, which “is designed to aid consumers in organizing and distributing digital files stored on either their main hard drive or an external hard drive. Users can tag, rename, and sort files into various categories and make them available for public or private use.” This will conceivably help you in managing your backups, etc., with the Maxtor OneTouch III Mini.

200GB SATA 2.5-inch Drive From Fujitsu

MobileWhack.com has news of the world’s first 200GB 2.5-inch Serial-ATA (SATA) harddrive for notebooks. According to MobileWhack, it was specifically designed to meet demands of high end audio/video computing applications such as gaming, video editing, audio recording and DVR functionality. It’s targeted at high-end notebooks, although as more and more ultraportable notebooks roll out with Intel’s new Centrino platform, with SATA capability in many of the notebooks, it won’t be surprising to see this drive show up all over the place.

Even though it’s geared towards audio/video manipulation, it’s actually 4200rpm (although it will be faster than a typical 4200rpm in the 2.5-inch class because of the engineering behind it).

Of note, it consumes 1.6W during R/W functions, and at idle, only 0.5W. That is not bad at all.

More Info on Samsung Flash-Based Drives

TG Daily has more information about Samsung’s upcoming NAND flash-based drives. We already know they are using the 1.8″ small form factor and are come in 32GB capacities, but we speculated about power consumption and speeds, and now we have the specs (only from Samsung’s PR though): they can read data at 57MB/s and write at 32MB/s (which according to TG daily is about twice as fast as a normal 1.8″ drives. They are being called “solid state disks” (or SSDs).