We are finally starting to see some real technological breakthroughs in the area of mobile storage after a long period of stagnation. 2004 saw the rise of speedy 7200RPM hard drives while this year saw the introduction of perpendicular recording which allows data to be recorded in a smaller area. Just yesterday, DailyTech reported on Seagate's hybrid solution which pairs a traditional hard drive with perpendicular recording technology to 256MB of non-volatile flash for better performance, increased battery life and faster booting in Windows Vista.
Today, PQI is showing off new drives that mimic Samsung's 32GB Flash-SSD. PQI, with the help of Samsung NAND flash memory chips, has new 64GB IDE and 64GB SATA 2.5" storage solutions for mobile users. The drives, which are due for release in August, are by nature more rugged, lighter, cooler and more efficient than traditional hard drives with a spinning disc. And best of all, there are absolutely no moving part so no more listening to your hard drive whir while you’re typing away and no more clicking and thrashing as you open up Photoshop or perform other disk-intensive operations.
Pricing has not been announced on the new 64GB IDE and SATA 2.5" drives, but rest assured that the new drives will be many times more expensive than even the fastest 7200RPM hard drives on the market today. As the market matures and more players enter the fray, we are sure to see a steady fall in prices. In fact, Samsung predicts that the global market for NAND flash based drives will increase from $540M USD in 2006 to over $4.5 billion USD in 2010. With growth like that, there will always be a premium for NAND-based disks over traditional hard drives, but the price differential should be much more manageable than it is today.
