Taipei Taiwan - PQI has announced a new solid state drive with a capacity that rivals regular laptop hard drives.  The 256 GB “Turbo +” SSD has a maximum transfer rate of 60 MB/sec, according to PQI.  The company expects SSDs to be the “hard drive of the future” and take up to 30% of the hard drive market in 2008.

The drive fits into the standard SATA drive slot that you see in most modern notebook computers.  Other companies have offered SSD drives, but they often have less capacity than standard laptop hard drives.  Most laptops today ship with drives that have 120 GB or higher of capacity.

PQI didn’t announce the price of the drive, but it is likely to be astronomical.   Currently NAND flash prices hover in the $10 a gigabyte, but industry experts predict this will fall to around $5 a gigabyte by next year.

But it's getting cheaper very quickly. That was the message of Jim Elliott, Samsung's director of flash marketing. NAND flash density is doubling every year, he said, and prices fall by 50% -- what's $10 a gigabyte this year will cost only $2 a gigabyte by 2010.

Read all news from Computex 2007 

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