Flash drive: capacity will increase, price will decrease

How do laptops get thinner, lighter, faster and more reliable? SanDisk's answer is the flash drive.

SanDisk has just introduced a 32GB drive model for commercial laptops. A special feature is that this type of drive stores information on flash memory chips while regular hard drives use magnetic disks.

Technically, flash drives are more durable than traditional hard drives thanks to the structure without moving parts. The flash drive is free from vibration, being able to 'survive' after 'free fall' from a certain height and save more energy. SanDisk said their new product could increase battery life by about 10%.

Another important advantage of flash drives is the speed of data retrieval. The test results proved: the flash drive starts Windows Vista in 35 seconds while the traditional hard drive takes 55 seconds.

However, SanDisk admits this type of drive is not for everyone because the price is too high. A 32GB drive is even smaller than the portable player's drive, but the price of a computer that uses this drive will have to increase by about $ 600.

Of course the capacity will increase and the price will decrease over time. SanDisk confirmed that the flash drive will reach consumers in the first half of 2007.

Traditional hard drive manufacturers are also continuing to increase "data density" and reduce prices. In 2006, Hitachi announced it would soon introduce a 1 TB hard drive (terabyte, ie 1024GB).

According to experts, online video will be difficult for flash because an average standard video hour has a capacity of about 1GB, but an hour of high quality video requires 4GB.

Bill Watkins, technical director of Seagate hard drive manufacturer, said that currently, each laptop has an average of 80GB of hard drive, and that number is increased by 7 to 8GB after each quarter. And by 2010-2011, this average will reach 250GB, a major challenge for flash drives.

HOANG MINH