Samsung is trying to dispel some concerns consumers are having about using flash-based solid-state drives in their computers, saying they are more reliable that a lot of people think. Sure, having a 64GB SSD in your notebook at first sounds like a pretty good idea. Faster boot times, no moving parts to wear out, but then the price hits you. Adding that SSD can increase the overall price of the computer by as much as $900. Also, in terms of computing, a maximum 100,000 write cycles just doesn’t seem like that much.

Michael Yang, flash marketing manager at Samsung, is assuring us that 100,000 write cycles is actually quite a bit. He states that the SSD can write 100,000 times to each and every memory cell, and the drive controller evens out the cells that get written to with “wear leveling”. As an example, Yang says that a 64GB SSD could be fully erased and filled again with data every hour and it would still last years before failing. He also said the failure would then likely come from the controller, not the memory cells. He also expects the price of SSDs to drop around 40 percent each year, making this alternative more affordable.

Larger capacity solid-state drives will be on their way soon from SanDisk. That’s because SanDisk and Toshiba are working together on a new 43-nanometer manufacturing process which will give us SSDs with the same capacity as those of today’s typical 2.5″ hard drives.

Flash memory is the natural replacement for hard drives in ultra-small notebooks like the MacBook Air and Asus Eee PC, because they use less power, generate less heat, and have faster access times than hard drives. The only downside is that as the Gbs go up the cost will get higher.

HP unveiled today a new energy efficient business focused desktop computer it says is the industry’s first to offer a solid state hard drive. It’s called the HP Compaq dc7800 Ultra-slim Desktop PC and pricing begins at around $1,260.

The HP Compaq dc7800 Ultra-slim Desktop PC features a solid state hard drive as part of its configuration options. This drive provides quicker access to data and has no moving parts, eliminating quick wear out. This desktop computer is also designed to meet EPAT Gold environmental requirements.

Puget Systems today announced the release of the Deluge, the companies most aggressive gaming rig to date. The systems can be highly customized but all of these liquid cooled systems feature some of the fastest and most powerful components available, including nVidia’s 780i triple-SLI, overclocked Intel 45nm Penryn processors and OCZ DDR2 heatpipe memory. Optional BigFoot Networks’ KillerNIC and MTron Solid State drives are also available.

Puget’s goal was to create an intense gaming system that did not require gamers to pay through the nose to get own, and the system they’ve come up with looks pretty good. The company is offering three different Deluge-i systems to start from with pricing starting at around $2600 and with options can extend to well over $10k. All can be tailored to your own specs but come standard with the following:

It looks like those MacBook Air rumors were really not too far off. Today Steve Jobs announced the latest addition to the MacBook lineup at MacWorld in San Francisco, touting it as the thinnest notebook in the world. The MacBook Air measures a mere 0.16 inches at its thinnest point, and it only gets as thick as 0.76 inches at the hinged end.

The Air Mac will start shipping in about two weeks with a retail price of $1,799, and comes with the following features:

According to a press release, BiTMICRO will be amazing some people for sure, with their new 2.5-inch solid-state drive with an amazing 832GB of NAND flash. The 3Gb SATA drive is a new addition to their E-Disk Altima line, and uses a technology they are calling multi-level cell (or MLC) memory, which doubles the number of bits stored per memory cell when compared with single-level cell (SLC) NAND. Apparently this increases data density and allows them to keep the price low.

Looks like they will be shipping in the 3rd quarter of 2008. That’s when we should see capacities ranging from 32GB all the way up to 832GB.

Lenovo is stepping into the consumer PC market with a pre-CES announcement yesterday about its new line of “Idea” notebook and desktop PCs. These models will consist of a variety of consumer-oriented IdeaPad notebooks and IdeaCentre desktops. You can expect to see some of these models hitting retail outlets in the next few months.

Lenovo seems to be coming out of the gate first with its IdeaPad notebooks. Three models will initially fill in this line up - the 17-inch widescreen IdeaPad Y710, the 15.4-inch widescreen IdeaPad Y510 and the ultraportable 11-inch widescreen ideaPad U110. Features which will be integrated across the line, according to Lenovo, include face recognition for logging into the notebook, enhanced multimedia experiences and a “distinctive look and design.”

Mitron, a South Korean developer of Solid State Drive (SSD) products, announced today the introduction of a new SSD for the consumer market. It is called the Mtron SSD MOBI and it will price at around $650.

The Mtron SSD MOBI is geared towards the likes of high end gamers and video graphic artists. It delivers 32GB of storage, a maximum reading speed of 100 MB per second, maximum writing speed of 80 MB per second and random access time of 0.1 ms. The 2.5-inch body which hosts all of this is outfitted with a Serial ATA interface for replacing that hard drive in your laptop or desktop computer.

Hitachi today announced another step forward in packing more data into the same sized hard disks with what is now the world’s smallest read-head technology for hard disks. While others (Hitachi themselves included) are starting to turn to solid state drives or hybrid drives with advantages of moving parts, faster response times and less power consumption, Hitachi continues to make advances on the HDD front stating it continues to provide a better capacity to cost ratio than other technologies.

Samsung Electronics is marching on with its solid state drives (SSD) today by announcing 64GB models are now shipping. These are reportedly immediately available in Dell and Alienware consumer notebooks.

Samsung said “Alienware will provide a 128GB SSD configuration, by offering dual 64GB SSD drives in a RAID 0 array, as well as a single 64GB SSD combined with a large capacity 200GB 7200RPM drive, available on the powerful Area-51 m9750 gaming notebook. Dell is offering the SSD drive on its premium XPS M1330 ultra-portable notebook, and expects to make it available across additional XPS systems, as well as Latitude corporate notebooks and Dell Precision mobile workstations later this year.”

Dell is bringing some new power to its lineup of Precision mobile workstation computers today. The computer manufacturer announced the Precision M6300, available now for a base configuration price of $2,070.

The Dell Precision M6300 borders on being a desktop replacement model, sporting a 17-inch wide aspect WXGA+ display. It’s powered by 64-bit Intel Core 2 Duo and Extreme Edition processors up to the X7900 and combined with NVIDIA Quadro FX1600M OpenGL discrete graphics. You also get up to 4GB of RAM and your choice of hard drives, including solid state and encrypted.

Today Alienware announced that they will start selling notebooks that utilize Solid State Drives (SSD) to improve performance through the drives faster read and write speeds. The SSD drives will be offered in the Area-51 m9750, Aurora m9700 and Area-51 m5550 notebooks.

In addition to getting your notebook with the fast flashed-based storage, two of the notebooks will also offer dual 64GB SSD drives in a RAID 0 configuration. The company is even offering a dual drive configuration that combines a 32GB SSD drive for faster booting and running applications along with a …

Buffalo has a new solid state drive out pushing the SSD storage capacity to as large as 56GB. This drive keeps small in stature however with dimensions of only 57mm x 89mm x 14mm and a weight of only 60 grams. It’s ready for the real world with shock resistance and is small enough to fit in your pocket giving you 56GB of easy-access storage on the go.

The Buffalo SHD-UH comes in different capacities ranging from 16GB up to the 56GB version and getting SSD in this capacity apparently is still …

We’ve seen some solid state drives announced but today Samsung is the company that was able to bring a 1.8″ 64GB solid state drive into mass production. The SSD is intended for use in UMPC’s, notebooks and other portable devices as a smaller, faster, lightweight replacement to traditional hard drives.

Drives using Flash-based memory promises to provide faster boot times to be quicker at pulling up applications since it can access the data faster. It also boasts a lower battery consumption compared to devices with spinning hard drives.

Samsung …

Coming toward the end of this month is a new hifi CD player from Opera Audio called the Forbidden City Ping featuring a solid-state 100 watt 2-channel amplifier, and a LED display and an AM/FM tuner. They’ve designed a linear style player with an interesting color pattern that comes in red or gray that almost looks like peg-board.

The interesting part about this hifi CD player/amplifier is it’s a USB 1.1 connection to your computer. Using a SpAct interface through USB the Ping player can play music on you computer …