01/02/2008, 2:15pm, EST
Wednesday, January 2ndCrucial intros SSD for notebooks, USB
Crucial today became the latest storage producer to explore solid-state hard drives with a new take on the formula. Simply titled the Crucial SSD, the 2.5-inch disk holds either 32GB or 64GB of memory and is meant as a faster, more durable drop-in replacement for conventional rotating hard drives. Like most of its kind, the SSD has no moving parts and is almost completely skip proof; without the need to spin, it also has an access time of under 1 ms and often performs faster than the old technology, Crucial says. Unlike most such drives, however, the new disk is not limited to the inside of a computer. A new external kit converts the device into a USB drive for easily removable storage.
The new Crucial device normally plugs into any computer's internal Serial ATA ports and is hot-swappable, allowing it to be removed if not essential to the system itself. Mounting brackets are included to fit the drive to desktops. No pricing has been announced for either the 32GB or 64GB versions, both of which are scheduled to ship to computer stores along with the external kit before the end of winter.

Filed under: upgrades/storage
Other story tags: SSD, Crucial
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So, in five year's time you might be looking at multi-terrabyte SSDs costing GBP:100.00 or so.
Or, looking not too far into the future, drive sizes are likely to double in size, and halve in cost over the next year to eighteen months.
Yeah, that's why I've got 2 400GB drives in my Mac, plus three 500GB drives used for secondary storage and several other external firewire drives.
MacBones - I think you're wrong about DVD/BluRay. The inherent advantage to these formats is that they are really cheap to reproduce. ie you can press thousands of them at a time for pennies each. I doubt flash/SSD drives will compete with that in the short term. Likewise, when you want to give people copies of documents on disk you aren't going to give away flash cards rather than cheap plastic discs.