Dell Puts SSD Hard Drives in Latitude D420 and ATG D620

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Dell is one of the first major U.S. players to offer a flash based hard drive in its notebooks. The Dell Latitude D420 and rugged Latitude ATG D620 will both offer 1.8&quot; 32GB SSD drives as an option.

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Pricing and availability

The SSD drives will be available today from Dell.com at a list price of $549 when configured with the ATG D620 and D420.

Advantages

While 32GB isn't a whole ton of storage space, the drive is targeted at mobile users that prefer reliability, speed and data security over sheer storage volume. Usually these people are willing to pay a price for those advantages, here's an outline of the advantages:

• Lower power consumption than regular mechanical hard drive, drives can be 50% more efficient than a regular hard drive as it uses 0.9 watts compared to the 1.9 watts of many regular hard drives
• Better reliability, SSD drives are more reliable than a regular hard drive (on average SSDs deliver 2 million hours mean time between failures (MTBF))
• Better performance, data moves to and from the SSD drive almost 100 times faster than a regular hard disk that use a mechanical head for reading and writing data, some example speed readings are
  • Read rate of 67 MB/s
  • Random read rate of 7,000 inputs/outputs per second for a 512-byte transfer
  • Windows Vista boots in about 30 seconds and can access files at an average speed of 0.11ms, a regular hard drive takes 48 seconds to boot Vista and 17 milliseconds to access a file
• Cooler and quieter running as there is no motor, bearings or moving head mechanism.
• More secure with data as a drop situation is less risky for losing than the same situation with a regular mechanical hard drive

Although 32GB is a small amount of space, there's certainly an audience of buyers out there that would prefer this small and fast hard drive over a 200GB large and slow regular hard drive. They'd also be willing to pay the price premium. For some, all of the factors listed above make the higher price yet lower capacity worth it -- sometimes storage space isn't everything.

 

I can't see it becoming a major thing for the D620, but the small size, thin form factor, and battery life demands of the D420 make it a perfect candidate IMO.

 

This is an enormous leap and a good one at that, too. While we're seeing more and more hybrid drives being incorporated in today's mainstream notebooks, they're just a baby step forward compared to the huge leap offerred by SSDs.

Size really isn't all that much of an issue for the mobile-conscious user - a heavy duty mobile user can always purchase a 1.8-2.5" laptop harddrive and use it as an external drive for massive space. I myself am still using a 15GB HDD on a 5-year old Sony with 9 GB still free. Today's availability of 4GB flash thumb drives and microSD/SD card in the multi-GB range far exceeds the limits we faced just a year ago. Portable disk space simply isn't an issue anymore so the only thing that would keep me from jumping onto the SSD craze is its enormous $550 price (from Dell, at least).

But as with all other technologies, their prices will always rapidly fall with time.

 

SSD is really an amazing leap for HD technology on all those points Andrew makes, but especially in reliability and cooling which are both related to power consumption.

Good thing Dell has adopted it early. I'd expect Lenovo and Gateway to follow, then probably Sony and lastly HP. Predictions based on business-type notebook companies.

 

This is really a great leap. 32 GB isn't much, but I anticipate that increases with time. The price is kinda high, but I guess it's worth it.

 

Does anyone know if SSD drives suffer from performance degradation as they get filled up just as regular hard drives do ?

 

Can one of these SSD drives be installed in an existing D420?

Or does it have to be built-in from the factory?

 

Ahaaa... I just found this:

http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=bsd&cs=04&sku=341-4872

 

no, they shouldn't. ssd has virtually no seek time when comparing to hdd.

 

If nothing else, you always have to commend Dell for being one of the first to go to market with new technology(yeah I know a couple of others came out, but yeah.).

 

Man that SSD is gona be cool! I want the 128gb one when its available to replace my 200gig 4200rpm in my lappy and ill use the 200gig as external drive .Wonder how much battery life it will add to the 3hours i get now with my 17"lappy

 

This is a good move. It's pricey, but SSD seems to be the way of the future. I'd like to see some hybrids featuring both SSD and HDD's working together if possible until the price for SSD falls further. This is a good start for helping expand this technology and get its price down though.

 

If you add the SSD to the basic D420 configuration, you can still get a laptop for under $2,000.

 

Thats what dell is all about.

They pay the manufacturers a lot of money for exclusive market time.

 

I'm glad I decided to go with the D420 (it should arrive tomorrow). I'm not ready for SSD yet, but it's nice to know I'll be able to swap drives when I'm ready.

 

Sony already offers SSD drives in the UX series, as well as the Sony G1.

 

This is defiantly a step in the right direction. I can't wait until more big manufacturers start offering the option.

My question might be a little off topic, but I dont know where to ask it, and i figured it might be related enough to the topic.

Would it be possible, or more importantly, practical, to have a small ultraportable/thin and light lappy, for general use, and have a desktop at home/work running as sort of a private server for large storage? I'm fairly certain you can set up a private server without much trouble, but I guess I'm concerned with how practical it is. would the gains in speed and such of the OS and applications on a SSD be undermined by needing to relay back and forth with the desktop to load the files. (videos, music, documents, etc.)

 

Nice! We don't get the G series here in the US, right?

 

Nope, have to order it through Dynamism (you can get it with an English keyboard and English OS though, so no problems).

I'm not sure honestly why Sony doesn't bring the G series out here; they sell the TX, and if that can do OK in the US, the G series would almost certainly be able to do OK too.

And if I recall, the Z505 laptops (or whatever they were), which the G series is sort of a spiritual successor to, always did pretty well in the US.