Tech Shout!

On Tuesday, PC manufacturer Dell announced that it is offering a 1.8-inch 32GB solid state drive (SSD) from SanDisk on Latitude D420 ultra-mobile and D620 ATG semi-rugged notebooks. Dell is on of the pioneering companies to offer a flash-based drive as an alternative to hard disk drives (HDD) on corporate notebooks.

Dell feels that flash-based drives have immense capability, and the company is therefore committing to offer them across next-generation Latitude notebooks because they enable better reliability, increased performance and noise reduction.

A SSD is a hard drive alternative based on flash memory. Unlike a traditional HDD which uses spinning discs and read/write heads, a SSD is designed with flash memory with no moving parts. The new drive has the same shape and size as a HDD and uses the same connectors for integration into existing systems.

“A solid state drive is an excellent storage technology for our mobile users.” Kettler continued, “We are committed to leading the industry in delivering these new drives and will offer them across Dell’s next-generation of Latitude products,” said Kevin Kettler, chief technology officer at Dell .

Engineering tests show that the SSD has an operating shock tolerance of up to 1,300 Gs, which is twice the rating of mechanical drives. The drives are also anticipated to reduce the probability of failure by three-and-one-half times compared to standard mechanical drives.

“This represents an important milestone in the evolution of personal computers with the arrival of solid state flash memory as a durable, efficient alternative to the hard drive,” said Eli Harari, SanDisk’s founder and CEO. “For those enterprise road warriors who rely on their notebook PCs, hard drive crashes with attendant loss of critical data will soon be a thing of the past. We’re delighted that Dell has chosen the SanDisk SSD to launch this technology into their line of mobile PCs.”

The new drives can also increase system performance by up to 23 percent(5) and decreases boot time by up to 34 percent compared to traditional HDDs available with the Latitude D420 and D620 ATG.(6)

The SSD drives are available right away at a list price of $549 in America. Europe and Asia will see the drive coming in soon.