Prometheus 6

Unlike traditional hard drives, flash memory drives do not contain moving parts. As a result, flash devices are less prone to breaking down — flash cards can survive drops from research balloons — and consume less energy.

SanDisk wants to replace the hard drive in notebooks with flash memory, a swap that it says will make thin laptops faster and more reliable.

The switch, however, will cost you a few hundred dollars more.

SanDisk on Thursday released a 32GB drive for commercial notebooks that stores information on flash memory chips rather than the magnetic platters that make up a traditional hard drive. The drive is available only to manufacturers, and the company declined to give out pricing or identify any notebook makers that will adopt it, but SanDisk said notebooks sporting the drive could come out in the first half of 2007.

For the past year or so, flash memory makers have promised to come out with products that will challenge hard drives in notebooks.

The debate between flash makers and hard drive manufacturers will be one of the big topics at the Computer Electronics Show and Storage Visions, which both take place next week in Las Vegas. While SanDisk shows off its flash drive there, drive makers will be touting hybrid hard drives.

Unlike traditional hard drives, flash memory drives do not contain moving parts. As a result, flash devices are less prone to breaking down — flash cards can survive drops from research balloons — and consume less energy. SanDisk's flash drive can increase battery life by about 10 percent, said Doreet Oren, director of product marketing for SanDisk.

Flash also can retrieve data faster. In its own tests, SanDisk says its flash drive can boot up Windows Vista — the next version of the Windows operating system — in 35 seconds, 28 seconds faster than the 55-second boot-up time required with a conventional drive.

Military and aerospace customers have been buying so-called solid state flash drives for about a decade. Some have capacities of 256GB and are quite sophisticated.