Regular or ultra? Consumers will now have at least a couple of performance options when they order solid-state drives on the newest ultraportable notebooks from Dell.

Hard disk drives are getting scarcer by the week in the ultraportable notebook market. Dell has officially started selling its new 2.2-pound Latitude E4200 this week with solid-state drives as the only storage option, accelerating a trend in ultraportables away from hard disk drives.

The popular ThinkPad X301 also comes with solid-state drive options only.

The SSD options on the E4200 come in two flavors, standard or "Ultra".

Dell pre-announced the … Read more

Updated at 5:00 p.m. with closing share price.

SanDisk for Sale? The stock price says so.

The world's largest maker of flash memory cards for digital cameras jumped 31 percent, or 4.18 points, Friday on rumors that Samsung would buy the company.

This follows a recent spate of rumors including one that said Seagate was interested in SanDisk. While Samsung already makes flash memory and is a leader in the emerging solid state drive market, Seagate does not sell SSDs and is looking to get into the market.

Samsung doesn't need SanDisk to grow; the … Read more

First it was Intel. Now, Big Blue is keen on solid-state drives.

IBM said Thursday it is testing a 4-terabyte, high-speed solid-state drive array targeted at the enterprise, as the technology giant gives its imprimatur to flash-memory-based storage.

For years, flash memory cards--the first mass-market SSDs--have been limited to digital cameras and music players like the iPod. But SSDs are now poised to hit technological critical mass in terms of storage capacity, speed, and availability as they find their way into everything ranging from tiny netbooks to massive enterprise storage arrays.

High-performance enterprise storage is where IBM comes in. Engineers … Read more

Solid-state drives, if not yet ubiquitous, have arrived. You can find them in laptops big and small and as a high-octane storage option for gaming PCs.

SSDs made their mark by appearing in the trendiest ultraportables like the Apple MacBook Air and Asus Eee PC--typically as stratospherically priced options, fashion statements rarely seen in the real world.

These drives are now coming off their rarefied shelf space and appearing across a wider range of laptops and ultraportable computers.

Any new, lightweight enterprise laptop worth its salt comes with a large-capacity solid-state drive option now. Hewlett-Packard recently introduced the 3-pound EliteBook … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Intel will finally enter the high-capacity solid-state drive business with the goal of replacing hard-disk drives in both consumer and corporate markets.

This comes 20 years after Intel introduced its first flash memory--a 256KB flash chip in 1988. The world's largest chipmaker is announcing the line of solid-state drives at the Intel Developer Forum here.

The presence of Intel will intensify an already intensely competitive market. "Intel's entry into the SSD market has been expected for a while and although a bit delayed, represents the start of what we expect to be a very competitive market,&… Read more

Hewlett-Packard on Monday announced three notebooks, one as light as 3 pounds, that will use upcoming Intel low-power chips and solid-state drives.

The EliteBook 2530p and 2730p replace the current 2510p and 2710p models. The biggest changes are a brushed, anodized aluminum exterior casing, new wireless broadband modules, the use of upcoming Intel 45-nanometer ultra-low-voltage (ULV) processors, and the option for an 80GB solid-state drive.

HP will replace current low-power Intel processors with upcoming 45nm processors, said Keith LeFebvre, vice president and general manager for business notebooks, HP PSG Americas. However, LeFebvre did not specify which low-power processor models it … Read more

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Intel's newest version of Turbo Memory is trying to do what Windows doesn't do: transparently optimize Windows for flash memory storage.

At the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, Calif., Intel will be demonstrating its latest version of Turbo Memory based on flash memory to accelerate application performance in Windows.

Intel is offering a "dashboard" for Windows that allows the user to choose and control which applications or files are loaded into the Intel Turbo Memory cache (based on flash memory chips) for performance acceleration. Intel calls this "User pinning."

Custom … Read more

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--At the Flash Memory Summit taking place here this week, makers of solid-state drives cited their worries about lackluster performance on Windows Vista and, with no small irony, the dangers of hype.

Solid-state drives have become the de facto storage device for the category of small, inexpensive notebook PCs called Metbooks, and they're offered in high-profile laptops such as the MacBook Air and ThinkPad X300.

While Don Larson, product line manager at Intel NAND Products Group, said the tiny size and low power requirements of Netbooks make them an ideal product for solid-state drives (adding that … Read more

Micron Technology announced Tuesday that it will ship a series of solid-state drives next quarter ranging up to 256 gigabytes in capacity, but at one-third the price per gigabyte of existing drives.

Micron's RealSSD-branded products are targeted at both the corporate enterprise and laptop markets--the latter drives priced significantly lower. The Boise, Idaho-based memory chip manufacturer's entry into the high-capacity SSD market presages Intel's launch of a line of SSDs later this year. Intel and Micron have a partnership to jointly manufacture flash memory.

SSDs generally are faster and more power efficient than hard disk drives, though there is an ongoing debate … Read more