Dell ditches hard disk drive

THE WORLD'S SECOND favourite PC manufacturer, Round Rock's Dell, is starting to offer lightweight notebooks with pure solid state storage.

Solid state has been seen as the beginning of the end for the hard drive for some time. With capacities now getting up to 32GB, a solid state drive is now a real option for many notebook users without massive collections of downloaded MP3s or porn.

The Latitude D420, touted by Dell as 'Pure Portable Performance', comes with a SATA hard drive as standard, but can be upgraded to 32GB solid state drive for $450. The D620, which is a rough and ready road warrior machine, comes with the drive as a $300 option.

The advantage of solid state drives is that they are faster (no seek times), more durable (no moving parts) and consume less power (no moving parts means more battery life).

Dell is using a drive from Sandisk, one of the world's biggest flash memory makers. Dell reckons the drive can reduce boot times by 34% and can increase overall system performance by as much as 23% (in convoluted scenarios, we're sure).

You can check out the drive over at Dell here. Solid state drives are sure to be all the rage in the coming couple of years - expect to see capacities hit the double zeros and prices tumble accordingly. How long before every portable ditches the hard disk? µ