Solid state hard drives officially announced.
Yesterday Intel announced the first few models of its new line of solid-state hard drives based upon NAND gate technology. Rather than using spinning metal platters that use a lot of electricity ('a lot' is a relative term - when you consider the power consumption of a laptop running off of battery power, hard drives are power hogs) they use flashchips similiar to the ubiquitous USB key that just about everyone has one of these days. The Z-U130 line will come in 1, 2, 4, and 8GB capacities, read 28MB and write 20GB per second, which isn't bad for a flashdrive. The solid-state hard drives will initially be aimed at servers and embedded devices (such as PoS terminals). I'm hypothesising that early adopters will buy them for their homemade firewalls (you can get a lot of functionality out of a gigabyte of storage) and other homebrew devices. You can expect that they'll be appearing more and more often in laptops and PDAs as capacities climb and prices fall.