Dell touts Flash drive notebook

Eweek says that, at an event held under the powder-blue skies of beautiful San Francisco, Dell showed a unit with a 32GB Flash drive. It doesn't say whether it was held at the [http://www.vesuvio.com/] world's greatest bar.

Why bother with a Flash notebook? Flash isn't likely to malfunction the next time you trip up. Hard drives these days are a ton better than a decade ago when the slightest bump made notebook reliability a joke compared to beige-box desktops, but they still can't compete with solid state. Also, of course, response times are faster so if, like me again, you power up your notebook on the train at in Twickenham station, you don't have to wait for Richmond station before you're in business. Third, they suck less juice and run cooler.

The catch? Price, natch. A couple of hundred quid premium over Winchester storage means this is going to be a slow burn at first but, once the fat-wads have invested, prices will come down for the likes of you and me.

Dell is not the first to talk up Flash for primary storage but it's by far the most serious player of those that have done so. As ever, the back story with Dell doing anything is that this means the market is going mainstream.

That is mainstream not as in you with your T-shirt that could really use a wash, not your friend that hacked Apple's mail server, not your brother who named his daughter Ruby after a programming language, but him over there with the Next suit, that chubby bloke with the Primark shirt, that girl on the train with the sulky face. Maybe even your Mam and Dad, although probably not your Auntie Ethel. She wouldn't know a silicon chip from a Dorito. µ