2. NAND drives: Bye-bye, HDD?

It's nice to know that 2007 will finally bring one of the most coveted advances in computing -- the solid-state hard drive. The appeal of solid-state drives (SSD) is plain: They're lighter, faster, quieter and less power-hungry than conventional notebook hard disk drives (HDD), and they won't break if you drop them. NAND is the storage technology that will drive SSDs, making it one of the key technologies to watch in 2007.

NAND (which stands for "Not and") is a type of flash memory technology that excels at reading, writing and erasing data from flash memory. NOR (short for "Not or") is the other type of flash-based storage and is better suited for retrieving data from smaller devices like cell phones. NAND's strengths make it ideally suited for larger-storage drives.

Recognizing the appeal of solid-state mass-storage drives, a number of memory manufacturers have begun to develop flash memory drives for inclusion in laptops and other portable devices. In early 2006, Samsung announced the development of a 32GB NAND drive that it touted as a "hard-drive" killer, and both Samsung and Sony have released notebooks with flash-based drives in Asia. A number of other notebook manufacturers, including Toshiba and Lenovo Group, have expressed a desire to integrate memory drives into notebook computers. Recent reports have indicated that solid-state hard drives are being built with data throughput capacity of up to 62MB/sec. This is close to 100 times faster than conventional hard drives.

The kicker? The 32GB drive that SanDisk claims is capable of these speeds has a 1.8-in. design. Finally, because of their small size and lack of moving parts, NAND drives consume a fraction of the energy and generate a small percentage of the heat of standard disk-based drives.

The downside of NAND drives is that these tiny drives cost upwards of US$500 or US$600. That's a lot of budget room to spend on a 32GB drive, which explains why technology hasn't been implemented in more laptop configurations.

Perhaps as a short-term measure while the price per gigabyte of fixed-drive NAND storage drops -- a market condition that appears to be developing courtesy of industry oversupply -- drive manufacturers are beginning to experiment with and embrace hybrid hard drives that use both traditional moving parts as well as NAND storage.

The working concept behind these drives is a NAND cache of substantial enough size (under 1GB, with initial sizes ranging from 128MB to 256MB) to store a high number of the small, frequently accessed files that operating systems and users work with. Caching these files allows the main drive to shut down during standard system operation, reducing power consumption and extending battery life. In the summer of 2006, Samsung announced plans to release one such hybrid hard drive at the same time Microsoft Corp. released Windows Vista. This product is still pending.

Intel Corp. has also been smart enough to pick up on this awkward stage of drive technology. The company's pending flash cache technology, code-named "Robson," permits faster hard-drive throughput by using a flash memory cache on the motherboard to speed up disk-based data transfers.

Microsoft also understands the importance of hybrid hard drives. ReadyDrive, one of Windows Vista's new features, was created to accommodate and enhance the performance of hybrid drives by intelligently storing the most frequently accessed files on this cache. The new operating system also includes native support for solid-state drives via ReadyBoost, another new feature that allows Windows to use flash memory devices as additional memory caches or even as boot disks to enhance performance. This is welcome relief for those of us holding onto the promise of pure, solid-state drives.