Flash Based Laptop Hard Drive

James Stoup at Apple Matters has an interesting piece on the possibility of laptop memory manufacturers going from the current spinning hard-drive model to a flash based one:

I fully expect the low end of Apple’s products to become flash based in the near future. I also expect Intel’s new, low power mobile chips (code named Yonah I believe) to arrive in the same time frame. And in two years I have a feeling that Jobs will announce an Intel-flash iBook that will be the thinest laptop ever made boasting the best battery life of any current machine.

James, I think you’re quite right. They said that the laptop could never overtake the desktop in computing power, but improvements in technology have dictated otherwise.

Others have noted that flash based memory has a maximum read/write-cycle limits — there is a maximum number of times that flash memory can read/write before it stops working. That’s a big problem to overcome. And when they do solve it, flash hard drives will be viable.