Flash (or solid state) memory has become ubiquitous in digital devices: cameras, music players, video players, keychain drives. About the last place that it hasn’t hit are traditional PCs. But Samsung and Microsoft are about to make that happen.
We’ve previously mentioned Samsung’s plans to release a hybrid flash/magnetic hard drive as well as their intention to release laptops boasting flash memory hard drives. Now we can shed a little more light on what flash memory might be doing in the computer.
Samsung has announced a 4GB flash memory drive in conventional 2.5” and 1.8” sizes for PCs; it’ll sell for under $200. Since 4GB is a little small to be used for storing all your data (you can’t even install an operating system in 4GB nowadays), the devices will be utilized by a Windows Vista feature called “Ready Boost,” which will essentially cache frequently read data on the flash drive, so the hard drive doesn’t have to constantly spin up. Think of it as a middle ground between your RAM and your hard drive. A cool idea, and one that I’m looking forward to. Too bad it’s only in Windows at the moment.
Alternatively, you can just get one of these cf to ide adapters and get similar functionality:
http://www.psism.com/adcf.htm
I would think these would make really great scratch disks or swap space, though, because the I/O speeds should be much quicker if there's no spindle wait times.
I think they should stick to the hybrid drives. I would imagine them to be more efficient, concerning physical space, and connectivity issues.
Sure, Vista can support it, but I'll bet it takes a butt load of time and energy to hook it up yourself. When has doing something like this been easy with Windows?