Vendors are touting solid state replacement drives as a way to protect corporate data in the event of a laptop being lost or stolen, and to boost performance at the same time.

We used two identical Lenovo T520 notebooks, that use an Intel i5 chipset, as our test bed. We used a network boot to load a copy of Windows 7 onto the notebook after we entered HDD Master and User passwords onto each drive and formatted them for NTFS.

Everyone is a trend watcher. But at a certain point, to determine which trends will actually weave their way into the fabric of business computing, you need to first take a hard look at the technologies that gave life to the latest buzz phrases.

Today's data center managers are struggling to juggle the business demands of a more competitive marketplace with budget limitations imposed by a soft economy. They seek ways to reduce opex (operating expenses), and one of the fastest growing -- and often biggest -- data center operation expenses is power, consumed largely by servers and coolers.

Sun Microsystems Inc. today announced upgrades to its Sun Storage 7000 family of disk arrays that double the performance and capacity from a maximum of 288TB to 576TB in a 4U (7-in) space. The company is also now offering high-speed InfiniBand connectivity to its array and Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA).

Intel Corp. and Micron Technology Inc. announced today that they have developed a new 3-bit-per-cell, NAND flash memory technology using Micron's 34-nanometer lithography process.

OCZ Technology Group Inc. said today it will release its Colossus solid-state drive (SSD) in the next couple of weeks, delivering the first 3.5-inch form factor SSD with 1TB of capacity.

Texas Memory Systems today unveiled its fastest and highest capacity solid state disk (SSD) system, the RamSan 6200, which offers as much as 100 terabytes of capacity in a single 40U rack configuration. The system also can sustain 5 million input/outputs per second (IOPS) with 60GB/sec. throughput while using slightly more than 6 kilowatts of power, the company said.

It's pretty much a given that solid state drives (SSDs) are the future of PC storage, and that hard drives are on the way out. But if you're buying a laptop today, which option is best?

With Intel introducing new faster and cheaper SSD drives coinciding with Windows 7's release to manufacturing, it might make sense to include one with your next computer purchase. After all, Windows 7 is the first Microsoft OS to include native enhancements for SSDs.

The recent revelation that Intel Corp.'s consumer-class solid-state disk (SSD) drives suffer from fragmentation that can cause a significant performance degradation raises the question: Do all SSDs slow down with use over time?

Companies are slowly starting to more closely evaluate solid-state storage technologies, though most are still waiting for the cost to come down before implementing it.