Dell offers SDD for faster, more durable notebooks
Faster, more reliable, and more durable notebooks is what Dell is promising, with the announcment that it is offering a 1.8-inch SanDisk 32GB solid state drive (SSD) on Latitude D420 ultra-mobile and D620 ATG semi-rugged notebooks.
“A solid state drive is an excellent storage technology for our mobile users,” said Kevin Kettler, chief technology officer at Dell.
“We are committed to leading the industry in delivering these new drives and will offer them across Dell’s next generation of Latitude products.”
Nice sentiments, though Dell is not exactly the first company to offer SDD. For example, Fujitsu announced the integration of SSD in two of its pen-enabled notebooks – the LifeBook P1610 and the LifeBook B6210 – in February, while Sony announced the availability of a 32GB SDD option for its Sony’s VAIO G1 earlier this month.
SSD drives, while technically not disks as we know them, offer numerous advantages over conventional mechanical hard disk drives (HDDs). Unlike a traditional HDD which uses spinning discs and read/write heads, a SSD is designed with flash memory with no moving parts. There is no initial spin-up, so they offer a significantly faster startup.
SSD drives also have seek speeds hundreds of times faster than HDDs, since traditional HDDs have to physically “seek” files before they are accessed. In addition, since there are no moving parts in SSDs, they are very quiet, more reliabile, more durable, and consume less power.
The new drives are said to be able to increase system performance by up to 23 percent and decreases boot time by up to 34 percent compared to traditional HDDs available with the Latitude D420 and D620 ATG.
According to Dell, engineering tests show that the SSD has an operating shock tolerance of up to 1,300 Gs, which is twice the rating of mechanical drives. In fact, during extreme impact testing the surrounding notebook hardware breaks before the drive.
In addition, Dell says the drives are predicted to reduce the probability of failure by three-and-one-half times compared to standard mechanical drives. This will help reduce costs associated with hard drive failures, which analyst firm Gartner reports is one of two top sources of system malfunctions in notebooks and accounts for up to 45 percent of total hardware failures.
The new SSD drives have the same shape and size as a HDD and uses the same connectors for integration into existing systems.
The SSD drives are available in the Americas for a list price of $549. The drive will be available soon in Europe and Asia.
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