Dell Offers Up a 32GB SSD Drive
3:31 pm April 24th, 2007 by Sal Cangeloso
Dell has taken another hint from their IdeaStorm site and started to off a 32GB solid-state hard drive on the D420 business ultraportable and the D620 ATG ruggedized notebook. Dell is not the first company to do this, but they are getting into the game much earlier than I would have expected given how they are generally conservative with new technology.
The 32GB solid state drive is a $549 dollar upgrade from the default 30GB model (that an extra $17 per gigabyte) but you get the shock tolerance and power savings that come with using a flash drive.
Dell’s press release does not say much but they are predicting that the change will “reduce the probability of failure by three-and-one-half times compared to standard mechanical drives” which should be music to the ears of any person who is especially hard on their notebook or has to use it under difficult conditions. In addition to reliability the drives should be quieter, which is always nice though if you are using a rugged notebook chances are it might not make a difference to you. Dell’s blog said the drives should also offer up better performance than a mechanical drive which is not always the case with this change and will depend on what drives are being compared (is more likely to be true with the D420’s 1.8″ 4200RPM drives).
According to the one included picture Dell is using Sandisk drives, which seems to be confirmed in the footnotes of the press release.
They drives are already available so you if have the cash and don’t need a lot of space, you can go for it right now!
