Dell spins towards a solid state future

Dell is shedding more weight from two of its Latitudes laptops by replacing their hard disks with solid state drives (SSD).

It's using SanDisk's 32GB SSD, flash memory that uses no moving parts, unlike traditional hard disks used in computers. The helps make the laptop lighter, more reliable and in theory should improve battery life a bit because the notebook will require less time with the fans spinning to cool the unit. The move comes hot on the heels of Sony making a similar announcement for its ultra-portable laptops.

Dell said it "sees potential for flash-based drives" because they enable better reliability, increased performance and noise reduction. It claimed that solid state drives are more reliable than traditional hard disks and so less prone to failure. Hard disks have spinning discs and read/write heads, which can fail.

The downside is current capacities are small, having only recently reached 32GB, and they are expensive. The SSD adds $549 to the cost of the D420 and D620 Latitudes, which will initially be available in the US, with Europe to follow later. While some laptops come with only 40GB hard disks - making the solid state drive only a tiny drop in capacity - this is still low-end and would be considered too small by many potential buyers.

In January, SanDisk has said that it can double the capacity of its SSDs within a year, which brings it to a more realistic size for a laptop. So towards the end of this year, we could start seeing laptops using 64GB solid state drives, and the beginning of the end for traditional hard disks in not just laptops but portable media players as well.