Flashtops: For the Spartan Office Worker
What do you get when you base your laptop’s whole memory on a flash thumb drive? A “Flashtop”.
Currently, we have the 4GB flash thumb drives available, but expect to see 8 to 16GB in the near future. We’ve also seen some programs that can be installed and executed from a flash drive. So it seems inevitable that one day, hardrives will go the way of the floppy disk.
Will there ever be a computer or laptop based on flash memory? Yes. There’s a 32 GB, 1.8-inch solid-state drive by Samsung presented last June. At the time, flash memory was at $30 per gigabyte, so this flashtop’s memory alone would cost around $960. The whole flashtop was in the $3,000 range. A bit too expensive for ordinary office employees but prices will be going down as researchers find ways to come up with cheaper ways of manufacturing silicon wafers.
The market? Flashtop makers are targetting people who like their computers spartan. Meaning, that most likely, they’ll be using their flashtops for e-mailing, internet surfing, write and store word processors and spreadsheets. With faster performance, silent operation, lightweight form, and improved battery life this will surely attract business people on the go. Sorry, gamers, it’s really not made for gaming, yet.
The hard drive makers say that flash memory is nice, but if you want to play games, HD movies, etc. you’ll be needing the good, ‘ol hard drive for that one. So gamers will have to stay glued to their HDDs until something better comes along, eh?
Uses? You can bring your entire desktop with you on a single flash drive. If you need to work on something, all you need to do is pop in that flash drive in a computer. Everything that was on your office computer can be copied down to your flash drive. After working, you can just pop it out and leave the computer like it was. There won’t be any residue or mark that you ever were there.
So what’s in store for flash memory? According to industry experts, eventually it Will replace the HDD in laptops to save space and energy. There’s also the benefit of less maintenance as there will hardly be any moving parts inside. As for the price, it will definitely go down as flash memory manufacturing gets cheaper and cheaper. Let’s hope the prices get lower fast enough for us to buy one soon.
Via eweek
What do you get when you base your laptop’s whole memory on a flash thumb drive? A “Flashtop”.
Currently, we have the 4GB flash thumb drives available, but expect to see 8 to 16GB in the near future. We’ve also seen some programs that can be installed and executed from a flash drive. So it seems inevitable that one day, hardrives will go the way of the floppy disk.
Will there ever be a computer or laptop based on flash memory? Yes. There’s a 32 GB, 1.8-inch solid-state drive by Samsung presented last June. At the time, flash memory was at $30 per gigabyte, so this flashtop’s memory alone would cost around $960. The whole flashtop was in the $3,000 range. A bit too expensive for ordinary office employees but prices will be going down as researchers find ways to come up with cheaper ways of manufacturing silicon wafers.
The market? Flashtop makers are targetting people who like their computers spartan. Meaning, that most likely, they’ll be using their flashtops for e-mailing, internet surfing, write and store word processors and spreadsheets. With faster performance, silent operation, lightweight form, and improved battery life this will surely attract business people on the go. Sorry, gamers, it’s really not made for gaming, yet.
The hard drive makers say that flash memory is nice, but if you want to play games, HD movies, etc. you’ll be needing the good, ‘ol hard drive for that one. So gamers will have to stay glued to their HDDs until something better comes along, eh?
Uses? You can bring your entire desktop with you on a single flash drive. If you need to work on something, all you need to do is pop in that flash drive in a computer. Everything that was on your office computer can be copied down to your flash drive. After working, you can just pop it out and leave the computer like it was. There won’t be any residue or mark that you ever were there.
So what’s in store for flash memory? According to industry experts, eventually it Will replace the HDD in laptops to save space and energy. There’s also the benefit of less maintenance as there will hardly be any moving parts inside. As for the price, it will definitely go down as flash memory manufacturing gets cheaper and cheaper. Let’s hope the prices get lower fast enough for us to buy one soon.
Via eweek
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