Now From Dell – The $920 Hard Drive

Dell has begun offering 64GB solid-state hard drives for both their laptops and also their Alienware division. The price sits at $920 as the title suggests… not that easy to stomach considering hard drives of much higher density are far, far less expensive. By comparison, the 32GB flash-based drive is a $540 upgrade on the Latitude D620.

From my personal browsing, I notice that Dell not only offers solid-state storage, but it will be enclosed in a shock-proof mount. In addition, they are also offering 1.8″ hard drives with the same mount, however they might prove slower than the flash-based counterparts. On the same notebook as mentioned above, the 32GB solid-state drive was a $540 upgrade while the 80GB 4200RPM drive was $390. I think I will just risk dropping my laptop rather than pay such an extreme premium. But that’s me. If you back up each night, you could save yourself a load of cash. Of course, if you really care about battery-life, that premium might be your only choice.

Dell is expanding its options for notebooks with drives built around flash memory. Earlier this year, the company began to sell a 32GB flash drive from Samsung as an upgrade option on some notebooks. This week, it has officially begun to sell Samsung’s 64GB drive. You can swap out a regular hard drive for a 32GB or 64GB flash drive on the Dell XPS 1330 consumer notebook or get a 32GB or 64GB solid state drive on the Alienware Area 51 m9750 notebook. Alienware will also sell you a notebook with two 64GB drives in it to bring the total to 128GB.

Source: News.com Blog