I am still patiently waiting for the day when NAND flash gets cheap enough that we can stop using normal hard drives and go for SSD drives in our notebooks. I could certainly use all of the battery life I can get and faster boot speeds are great too.

Super Talent announced a new line of SSD drives today that are direct replacements for normal 2.5-inch hard drives and use the SATA-II interface. The drives are called MasterDrive SSD and use a proprietary algorithm to extend the life of the drives.

Sure SSD drives sound cool in theory with the promise of faster boot times and faster data access while being more shock resistant and dead silent. However, the high price of the typical SSD drive and the small storage space compared to typical normal hard drives makes the SSD pill hard to swallow for most.

Super Talent has announced a new SSD that it claims to be the world’s thinnest SSD drive. Sorry, but I hardly think making the drive thinner will get mortal geeks to pony up the extra loot. Since Super Talent is mostly looking at OEM suppliers for the drive, perhaps it will pop up in the next generation of super thin notebooks similar to the MacBook Air.

Most geeks can understand the allure of a SSD drive with much faster data access, read and write speeds. What most geeks can’t get behind is the huge price premium you pay for the SSD when compared to a traditional hard drive and the amount of storage space you give up.

Today a typical hard drives in a computer are at least 80GB, even in tiny ultra portable systems. If you opt for a SSD you typically get 32MB, though some larger SSD drives are available like the 832 GB BiTMICRO SSD from CES 2008.

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.