Driving toward a faster boot

10.01.2007
Maybe it's because of my fixation on storage gear, but lately it seems as if the IT world is revolving around disk drives more that ever before. CES 2007 is no exception, from what I hear.

Before I dive into interesting CES news tidbits, let me go back a few days to an announcement from SanDisk about a that could easily replace the ATA drive in your notebook.

The SanDisk SSD UATA 5000 stores just 32GB -- not much compared to spinning notebook drives, but its performance should more than compensate for the small capacity. Based on SanDisk's benchmarks (available ), the UATA 5000 gets top marks while running a resource hog like Windows Vista and uses much less power than a comparable spinning drive.

Looking to replace your laptop drive with the 5000 before jumping into Vista? That was my plan, but unfortunately, SanDisk is only selling UATA 5000s to OEMs for now. Moreover, SanDisk estimates that a laptop with the SSD drive will set you back an extra US$600 or so.

SanDisk expects that price to go down eventually, of course. While waiting for that to happen, you may want to think about hybrid drives instead.

Hybrid drives are essentially a combination of flash memory and traditional disk drives that promises to be faster, more resilient, and less power hungry than old-fashioned, mechanical disks. We should see them popping into the market before spring.