The race toward affordable solid-state notebook drives is about to goose itself into hyperdrive, but PQI is coy about the pricing of its SSD Turbo+ line of solid-state storage, starring its latest 256GB solid-state notebook drive. What’s so great about that? It’s a speedy Serial ATA (SATA) drive, and it’s in a 2.5-inch form factor, the perfect size for just about any notebook. Oh yeah, and the main thing is that it’s not a spinning, noisy, hot and power-hungry hard disk.
How speedy? How’s about 60MB per second, plenty fast for almost anything you want to do? Plus, the thing will probably last 10 years, certainly longer than you’ll hold onto any laptop, and it uses less power, too. PQI rolled out two intriguing external drives at the same time:
The company also teased an upcoming 32GB ExpressCard (pictured above) that’s solid state, too. Depending on its price, this could be a welcome sight for those MacBook Pro worshipers, or users of any other laptops with ExpressCard 34 slots.
Also along for the ride was a CompactFlash card (pictured below) with 16GB of elbow room. The company touts that CF card’s high speed, reportedly giving you 38MB per second transfer rate. We’ll believe it when we see it.
But to hell with PQI for not telling us the price of any of these little trinkets, because anybody can make these drives for exorbitant prices. It’s bringing the price down to earth that will make all the difference in the world. Give us a day or two and we’ll see if we can beat the prices out of those pussies.
PQI ramps up 256GB solid-state notebook drive [electronista]
slknv
May 30, 2007 at 12:29 PM
It’s always puzzled me that my brand new HP laptop I bought this year, has the same battery life of the first laptop I bought in 1992 (it was about $5000, black and white, a 386 processor and a 10MB hard drive. Ah, back in the days before everyone had myspace!).
Yep, all the fancy stuff like built in surround sound and a TV tuner is so useful to me on the road. But battery life longer than 2 hours? Nope!
This is why stuff like PQI releasing info about huge solid state drives is quite morale boosting to me. Sure, they didn’t put a price on it – but the main effect of such an announcement is surely to shake up the other hardware manufacturers, and hopefully get their R&D and manufacturing ops into motion. And as more manufacturers work on similar products, they’ll continue to get faster and cheaper, and hopefully using less power… which will translate into better notebook computers with actual usuable battery life for us consumers! If only Moore’s Law was applicable to battery power!
Tim
Report PermalinkMcbLt
May 30, 2007 at 8:13 PM
You could always get a laptop that doesn’t have those things that you don’t want?
But as you’ve said, it’s great to see a company really getting behind solid state drives. It’s going to be great.
I guess we just sit back and enjoy the show :D
Report Permalinkricho2153
June 1, 2007 at 10:49 AM
im more interested in the fuel cell batteries and their 6 month + charge life.
Report Permalinkplus its like a hip flask but stashed in your laptop.
now that would be sweet