The Solid State Drive, or SSD, appears to be the future of Apple devices, including the recently updated MacBook Air. Toshiba, the maker of the SSD in the razor-thin MBA is making the Blade X-gale series more widely available. The drives – just around 2.2mm thick – are available in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB configurations to resellers and bulk purchasers.
“Delivering a product that enables superior user experience in a smaller footprint is the ultimate goal,” said Scott Nelson, vice president, Memory Business Unit, Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. A denser memory module permits the smaller size, Nelson explained.
Solid state drives permit ‘instant-on’ performance. However, traditional hard drive manufacturers complain Apple’s move toward flash memory drives for the MacBook Air, iPad and other devices amounts to a “stab in the back.” While flash drive maker San Disk is enjoying an upswing in demand, Seagate and Western Digital are struggling to stay afloat in a changing market, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
