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Look, no hard drive: flash only

Samsung has developed a higher-capacity version of its solid-state disk (SSD), a flash-memory based replacement for hard-disk drives, and is showing it at the CeBIT trade show in Hanover, Germany, this week.

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The drive packs 32Gb of flash memory into a case the same size as a 1.8in, hard-disk drive. That capacity is double the 16Gb of a prototype device announced by Samsung last year and was made possible by the continuing miniaturization of flash-memory chip technology.

At CeBIT the solid-state disk is being demonstrated inside a Samsung laptop computer. Because the SSD is the same size and shape as the computer's hard drive it was relatively easy to replace the hard drive with the SSD, said Yun Mini, a spokeswoman for Samsung.

The SSD technology has three major benefits over hard drives, said Yun. The first is that data access is faster. This could be seen when the SSD-based laptop was booted up alongside the same model machine with a standard hard drive. The desktop appeared on the screen of the SSD laptop in about 18 seconds while the hard drive-based computer took about 31 seconds to reach the same point.

The second advantage comes in durability. Because there are no moving parts in the SSD it is much better at withstanding shock and unlikely that data will be lost if the laptop is dropped. The third major advantage is that it works silently, said Yun.

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