Solid State Wut?

If Corsair can produce a 64GB USB flash drive that’s the size of my finger why can’t Dell or Acer or any laptop maker throw three or four of these puppies into a laptop. And what’s with the 8GB solid state drives? I can’t do much with that.

On the laptop note… when am I going to finally get my dual screen laptop? I want a 14″ laptop that has dual touch screens where one replaces the keyboards we now use. It should also fold flat and click together like a tentpole so I can use it as one big tablet. I’d create some illustrations but my non-touchscreen laptop would take too long. I wonder if there’s a WordPress plugin for sketches to an image…

Eric is a jack of all trades. From running social networks to internet cafes, he’s been in the startup scene for almost a decade. Recently returned from a stint at Start-Up Chile, Eric spends his days focusing on his startups Backup Box and Surreal WiFi.

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 29th, 2008 at 1:41 am and is filed under Design, Hardware, Uncategorized. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

  • Timo

    There are some 64/128/256gb flash sata drives, but they are expensive. Keep in mind that a usb flash drive isn’t intended for the same workload as a drive. It isn’t a big deal if they fail after a couple thousand writes since that’s unlikely to ever happen. Full drives need to work for hundreds of thousands of writes. Beyond that, usb keys tend to have sequential reads or writes, not random reads and writes. There are some cheap SSD drives that can do 100mb/s of sequential, but only 100 random IOs per second, which is comparable to a rotating disk drive. There are other SSD drives that can do 10,000 random IOs per second. Presumably doing so is hard and therefore expensive. I’d bet the sata interface is also harder to implement than the usb interface, again making it more expensive.
    All that said, I’d bet that the price of solid state drives will plummet this year to the point that most laptops will offer them at reasonable prices. That is one of the reasons I’m holding off on buying a new laptop.

    Dell now makes a dual screen laptop, but not the type you’re thinking. It has a second screen that pulls out from behind the first so you’ve got a 17″ and a 14″ next to it.
    Presumably the reason no one is making the type you mentioned is because it is hard to make a touch screen that is easy to type on. It is much easier to type on a keyboard because the keys actually have shape and boundaries, and move when you press them. With a touchscreen you pretty much have to be looking at the ‘keyboard’ as you type to have any accuracy.

  • http://solicitingfame.com Eric

    Thanks for the info, Timo. I knew there must have been some reason. I’m holding out for a new laptop as well. I think I’d like a tablet though. However, you should be able to just swap the drive, no?

    Yeah I saw Dell’s new second screen thing… doesn’t really appeal to my tastes at all.
    I found this though: http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/canova/canovas-dualscreen-laptop-likes-being-touched-233200.php

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