Photo by AMagill

Via Engadget: Samsung just presented a laptop that uses flash memory instead of the conventional hard disk.

While this may sound like another impenetratable tech buzzword that geeks invent to irritate the rest of the non-geek world it’s actually a big deal.

There are a number of attractive advantages of flash drives over conventional mechanical hard drives: because they have no moving parts data access on flash drives is faster and the drive is completely silent. Flash drives are shock resistant. Dropped your computer? Not that big a deal. Flash drives use less energy than a conventional hard drive — expect battery performance to sky rocket with future generations of laptops.

And computers with flash drives can potentially be much smaller than current models. Most people already use this memory-on-a-chip on a daily basis in the form of USB flash drives — and a USB stick with 1 GB of storage is no larger than a small lighter.

Think of it as the difference between the clunky and heavy first-generation iPod (5 GB hard drive) and the current generation iPod nano (5 GB flash drive).

There are still technical quirks to overcome, and the current price of flash memory is breathtaking (PCWorld cites $960 for a 32 GB disk). But it’s only a matter of time that affordable models are available for the mass market, and the effect on consumer products will be huge. Your watch could become a 100 GB flash drive.

See also: Ubiquitous Computing