"Seagate will introduce drives based on flash memory in various storage capacities across its range of products including desktop and notebook PCs, according to Sumner Lemon at IDG News Service. The drives are expected to consume less power (longer battery life), offer faster data transfer rates and be more rugged than spinning disk, which has moving parts that can be damaged from an impact."
I know the main concern most of you have is flash/solid state drive lifespan - lets look at it like this:
Take a 40GB hard drive, and pretend it's Flash memory. If you wrote 40GB worth of data to it every single day (with the circuitry inside a drive to spread writes out over cells evenly) you would average 1 write per day across each cell. Flash memory can be written to a minimum of 10,000 times before dying, most is even more reliably by an order of magnitude (100,000 writes). Assuming we have crappy 10,000 write limits, we could write 40GB to the drive every day for 10,000 days (or 27 years) before failing is an issue.
Looking at the 40GB drive in one of my machines, the total writes in its uptime comes to about 800MB, which is a shade under 24 hours uptime. That's 800MB worth of writes in a day, 50 times *less* than writing 40GB to the drive every day, so a 40GB flash drive at my current usage rate could be expected to last 27 * 50, or 1350 years.
A lot longer than I have to worry about. The numbers are going to differ for some people, but the initial stats work out - few people would write to every cell every day, and even then that's decades worth of use.
