Welcome to the era of no moving parts. Micron is preparing 256GB solid state drives for use in laptops and mini PCs and expect to have working models available in the next year. No pricing, but the drives use 2.5 watts when active and require limited cooling, ensuring your mini notebook won’t fry your lap.
SSD manufacturers have been on a learning curve, Klein said. “One of the things that SSD manufacturers have been slow to learn (is that) you can’t just take a compact flash controller, throw some NAND on there and call it an SSD,” Klein said. The controller manages the reading and writing of data on an SSD. “The application of storing data on a notebook–and certainly on the enterprise–is far different than that controller was designed to support,” he said.
The drives have special processors and a 64MB DRAM buffer to keep the data flowing.