[Rumor]

NEW YORK (The Wall Street Journal)--Samsung Electronics Co. said it began offering computer makers a set of flash-memory chips that are designed to replace hard drives in personal computers. But the price for the chips is so high it may take years to make a difference in the design of PCs.
The company, which is the leading maker of a type of flash-memory chips called NAND, is offering the chipsets first for notebook PCs. Samsung didn't release a specific price for the chipset. A spokeswoman said it expects a 32-gigabyte flash-storage chipset will sell for between $200 and $250 in 2008.

PC makers today can buy hard drives of 40 and 60 gigabytes for between $50 and $60. By 2008, hard-drive makers probably will be able to offer drives that are 120 and 150 gigabytes for that price range, said Jim Porter, an independent data-storage-market analyst in Mountain View, Calif.

Web-Feet Research, a market-research firm in Monterey, Calif., forecasts the market for flash-based chipsets that substitute as hard drives to be about 500,000 units this year, rising to 1.9 million units in 2008. Samsung cited the research in announcing its chipset at an event in Taiwan, where the biggest contract designers and makers of notebook PCs are based.

Flash chips have the advantage of consuming less power than hard drives, a plus for energy-conscious notebook users. Samsung's 32-gigabyte NAND flash-storage product is about five centimeters across, the same size as many hard drives used in notebook PCs. It weighs 15 grams (0.5 ounce), considerably less than the 50 or 60 grams of a hard drive.

Flash-memory chips, like hard drives, store information when power is off. Another type of memory chip, called DRAM, for dynamic random access memory, is used in a PC as a temporary warehouse for information that is moving between the hard drive and the microprocessor, the brain of the machine.

Samsung in September began to tout flash chips, used mainly in portable music players or in storage cards for digital cameras, as a potential replacement for hard drives.


Doesn't flash have a faster access time than a traditional hd?

[Dakar]

Still looks like we're a decade out from them seriously replacing traditional HDs

[ghporter]

No, flash is slower than most hard drives, even 4200RPM laptop drives. Samsung may be in the process of working through that issue though. An all-solid state computer would be theoretically more reliable; you'd never lose anything through a head crash or bearing failure!