I bought an mp3 player and it utilizes this tech, it's amazing how dependable and small out tech is becoming!

[highlight]Your hard drive is now obsolete[/highlight]
SanDisk's [highlight]flash-based[/highlight] feat, plus CES's coolest gadgetry, big and small
By Gary Krakow
Columnist

Twenty years ago I got my first home computer. It was an Apple Macintosh that someone had modified. They had installed a third-party device called a hard drive, which meant that the computer didn’t need floppy disks to boot up. Those early hard drives were large in size, wildly expensive and had storage capacities in megabytes — not gigabytes.
The rest, as they say is history. Over the years, hard drives have gotten smaller in size, bigger in capacity and a whole lot cheaper. A one-terabyte (1,000 gigabyte) drive was announced here at CES this week.
But mechanically, hard drives haven’t changed much over the years. They still have a lot of moving parts. And, as I can report from personal experience, at some point, all hard drives fail. These are not pleasant memories.
So, when I saw one PARTICULAR ANNOUNCEMENT at a show filled with press releases, I got very, very excited: SanDisk Corporation has introduced a 32GB, 1.8-inch solid-state drive (SSD) which is built to be a drop-in replacement for standard mechanical hard disk drives. This means the device has no moving parts.
Large capacity flash-based drives had been used primarily in the military, aerospace and telecom industries which demanded high performance, reliable storage under demanding conditions. But these drives were very expensive. Now, with flash-memory costs dropping, solid-state drives are becoming ECONOMICALLY and commercially viable.
In addition to being reliable, these drives are fast. SanDisk claims a sustained read rate of 62 megabytes per SECOND and a random read rate of 7,000 inputs/outputs per second. In plain English, that means it’s more than 100 times faster than most current hard disk drives.
I can’t begin to tell you what this ultimately means for the computer, PDA, cell phone and portable music device industries. The only thing that might slow down SSD acceptability is the price. Currently, SanDisk’s 32GB SSD will sell for $600. But, I would expect that price will drop as more and more companies choose solid-state drives. A number of electronics manufacturers are currently in talks with SanDisk — although they wouldn’t yet disclose which ones.

**[highlight]these things look just like a ram-stick[/highlight]**
link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16545386/

These things in laptops and you would have a fairly rugged piece of kit! Just the price holding us back at the moment. Plus you won't have that noise in the background when a program is ripping you HDD to pieces.

It's like MP3 players, I advise most people to go for a flash based one over a hard disk one. Try telling somebody that an iPod is a very brittle piece of kit in comparison to a cheaper model. They think you've gone nuts.Steelegbr &LT;<< right on. I bought my kids one of the 30 gig ipods 4-xmas.
I decided to get one myself but didn't want to spend that much. I bought the sansa e260 (4 gigs is plenty for me). This thing is awesome. It does more than I could imagine and so far* the quality is excellent. highly recommended...Heard about this.
It's supposed to mean less power-hungry and faster storage.
They're also talking about hybrid drives for laptops, with normal HDD used for storage and flash memory used for a cache.
Good advances anyway.A Bit more mind-boggling...Quote

A Bit more mind-boggling...

could you take your optical harddrive out and use it as a flash light?