Alienware ships first desktops with 64GB flash drives

Alienware today took the unusual step of launching an option for 64GB solid-state drives with its high-end gaming desktops, following its recent introduction of the same feature for its notebooks. The flash-based storage is available for both the Area-51 ALX and Aurora ALX systems and is meant to replace the main hard drive for gamers who want extremely quick load times without the penalty of a noisy or potentially unreliable 10,000RPM rotating hard drive. The option pairs up two of the 64GB drives in a RAID 0 stripe that not only improves speed even further but provides a continuous 128GB of space.

Choosing the SSD storage option consumes one of the drive options during the customization process but still leaves room for as many as two conventional hard disks for users who want the extra space for less demanding tasks. Alienware is already accepting orders today and says the drive selection adds $1,700 to the base prices of the AMD-based Aurora ($4,099) and Intel-based Area-51 ($4,999), which otherwise go unchanged from their most recent updates.