Samsung showcases a Flash Disk loaded Laptop

Hard Drives might soon be facing a new threat in the form of Flash drives, which are increasingly becoming a possibility for portable computers. With no mechanically moving parts, these drives are more reliable and can help further reduce the size of the digital devices equipped with these flash disks.

Samsung is the dominating player in this market and has developed a higher-capacity version of its solid-state disk (SSD), a flash-memory based replacement for hard-disk drives. They recently showcased a laptop powered with a flash-based storage system.

Their laptop came loaded with 32GB of flash memory into a case the same size as a 1.8-inch, hard-disk drive. They had developed this module in the shape of a regular laptop hard disk to make it easy to fit in a regular notebook without requiring to change their shape or internal mechanism.

Samsung claims that these kinds of storage solutions provide three primary benefits. The first is that data access is faster. The second advantage comes in durability because of no moving parts in the drive. The third major advantage is that it works silently. However, they would still have to work hard on bringing the cost of these disks down considering at the moment, flash memory costs around $30 per gigabyte.