New Apple Laptops to have Flash Drives

just been catching up on some news and read that apple are supposedly looking at putting flash drives into a new lineup of mactel iBooks and PowerBooks.

Would be really nice to see wouldnt it, having to wait .5 of a second instead of 10

How much is this going to effect the cost of them though, i havent even seen a 2.5" flash hard drive and even the 5.25" drives are darn expensive

I don't doubt that they'll go to flash hard drives in the future, but I don't see it happening within the next year.

Where did you hear this?

Before flash hard drives will go in laptops, i think they need to find a way to speed them up .

At lease they would use less battery power ! :dummy:

mynameis i read it on slashdot, now i know some of the stuff they have on there is far out put makes a good topic

Flash drives aren't even close to platter-drive and transfer speeds. I do believe, however, that solid-state drives will be the wave of the future. One of my near-future forays into this will be picking one of these up at an Apple store:

http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APP...pNrf22v197mN1PSk1enR/1.0.11.1.0.6.25.7.11.0.3

It's a solid-state camcorder and the demo-model worked pretty well, actually. Furthermore, it's pretty inexpensive for everything you get and everything it's capable of.

I can confirm that Intel has been working on a new flash drive technology for about 3yrs - initial use is for mega-sized hard drive caching - secondary plans are for storage of a "fast-boot" OS code chunk on the motherboard. Get the OS session up and flying -- then hand over to the mega cache on the HD - then finish up any other execution of the OS load in the background.

This has been "announced" to industry insiders and developers

last I heard it was '05 for the HD and '06 (Longhorn ...) for the MB solution

But as Intel management has learned (at least once) ..... new technology has its own schedule no matter how much you push - pull - or torture engineers ------ but thats another story

I'll bet they mean they're putting in flash card readers. I've often wanted that...

i also read this , i think its a bad mistake , i kind of hope they don't go with it , flash drives are nice , but there not perfect , neither is a hard drive , but flash drives hold the risk of data corruption/ loss of files over time , i know they say the life expediency is about 5-10 years , but still ... thats not very long if you think about it , i know most people will have upgraded by then , but what about the folks who still use it , one day they wake up and to there surprise there is nothing on there computer because the flash device expired . i don't know if i would like that feeling , though the flash drive is fast , i just don't think i would like it yet .. seems to risky or something , might have some big problems with it ,

I'm really kind of scared about the direction apple is going these days , with them switching over to x86 and then the thought of flash hdds in the next couple years is just kind of (ut oh!) to me , maybe because i m not fond of change to well , but possibly it will be a mistake and it could be the downfall of apple, when they have hit there peak once again , and then do something "new" and then the company crumbles once again , but we'll see . only time will tell i suppose.

Check this out:

http://www.lowendmac.com/bookrev/05/0701.html

I think most people posting so far miss the point that platter hard drives, however robust, are prone to failure from shocks and use battery power like crazy. It will be a long time before flash memory is as cheap on a per GB basis as HD.

One solution I have heard batted around is putting 'mega cache' solid state memory on hard drives so that they can stay spun down most of the time and this would presumably use flash type chips. This would keep the costs down, the capacity up, and maintain some of the speed and power saving benifits. It seems like such an elegant solution that apple may prove the first to implement it.

By the way nobody is suggesting using Compact Flash. There are much faster types of flash memory out there. CF is like an eight year old (maybe older) technology.

""One solution I have heard batted around is putting 'mega cache' solid state memory on hard drives so that they can stay spun down most of the time and this would presumably use flash type chips. This would keep the costs down, the capacity up, and maintain some of the speed and power saving benifits. It seems like such an elegant solution that apple may prove the first to implement it. ""

As I said Intel has sunk $$ into this - by that I mean creating a whole new type (i.e. new physical transistor design) of "flash" memory --- expressly for the purpose of a HD mega cache holding those chunks of code / data that are used most often --- sort of like adaptive caching

All major vendors have been on board since day one I predict release this fall

A little known fact -- Intel R+D labs built up a solid reputation for exotic IO modeling focused on HDs during 2000 - 2004. When this team went on the road to Seagate - Maxtor - Toshiba - etc ----- the engineers at those companies were blown away ------ pretty soon there was a steady parade of these guys coming back to Intel with their latest HD models to have them tested and tuned.

Why - because HD speeds / performance will become more critical as we really start to do more multi-tasking in the future