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Storage market in a fluid state as it goes solid state

Who'd have thought mobile PCs would follow mobile phones in their design concepts? Solid state storage has been with us since the 1960s. (You remember Mr Spock and his computer files on slim lumps of plastic don't you?)

So the concept is not new. What's interesting this week is that, after decades of promise, it's finally becoming a trend. Dell is now selling laptops with solid-stage 32GB drives, made out of the same stuff you put in your digital camera -- flash memory. And so is Tablet specialist Motion Computing. Come to think of it, Samsung did the same thing last year.

Back in the 1980s, the hot ticket was bubble memory. Invented in the 1970s and touted as a replacement for rotating media, it's a sort of non-volatile memory using magnetised areas, or bubbles, each of which stores one bit of data. But like so many such inventions, it fell by the wayside, defeated by the far superior economics of rotating media.

Essentially, the continually falling price of hard disk storage has acted as a barrier to the entry of every solid state memory technology for use inside computers.

Outside computers of course, it's been a different story, as the growth of flash memory for digital devices has burgeoned.

The result was a fall in prices as volumes grew and now, although flash is not exactly cheap -- rotating media will always be cheaper than solid state -- flash memory is just about cheap enough to make it in specialised uses. That's always been the case of course, but it's cheap enough now for volume manufacturers such as Dell to consider offering it in a product.

While slower than main memory, flash memory is for sure faster than a standard hard disk and way more physically robust. It's quieter too.

But it has one more disadvantage, namely that it wears out -- most products are only guaranteed to withstand a million programming cycles. Some claim though that with the right management, such devices can last over 50 years.

Whatever.

The point is that even before Samsung and Motion and Dell's inclusion of 32GB of solid state storage in notebook products, Microsoft's inclusion of a Flash cache function in Windows Vista suggests that there's a market. You can run a laptop quite comfortably with half or even a quarter of that amount of storage.

And as the bleeding edge moves inexorably on and becomes 64GB or 128GB, the price will fall. Solid state memory looks as if it will always be more expensive than a hard disk but I would bet that this is a market that'll grow.

When it comes to storage, most of us don't need to be on the bleeding edge.