$2000

Hard drives are where we store the majority of our data when we’re using a computer, but hard drives are mechanical beasts — they generate heat, have moving parts and are subject to failure. People have been talking about changing over to flash-based storage for quite some time now, but it hasn’t been a particularly practical solution owing to the high cost of flash memory. Now that flash memory is coming down in price we’re starting to see the first tentative steps towards adoption of flash as the computer’s main storage bin. The Samsung Flash SSD has 64 gigs of memory onboard, which is not a ton of memory for today’s modern needs, but it’s a great start. The drive itself is very lightweight and doesn’t generate a lot of heat, which will definitely be helpful inside a notebook…but it’s still insanely expensive. When you add to that the fact that flash memory cells still have a limited number of write cycles before they expire, it may not be the best option just yet…but those who do adopt this as their drive of choice will get fast performance out of the deal.

Shiny
- no moving parts
- very little heat generated
- lightweight
Dull
- expensive!!
- limited write cycles
- small capacities
- data recovery might be difficult

Flash SSD 64GB
Samsung