The hard disk is history

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, SanDisk announced a 32 MB flash drive designed to drop into notebook computers as a replacement for the traditional hard disk drive. No moving parts, 2 million hours mean time between failures and MORE THAN 100 TIMES FASTER THAN MOST HARD DISK DRIVES.

It will boot Windows Vista in as little as 35 seconds, with an average file access rate of 0.12 milliseconds. A regular disk drive boots Vista in 55 seconds, and accesses a file in 19 milliseconds, according to the brochure.

The primary user of such large flash drives to boot PCs is the military, which uses its junk in extreme conditions. Now for an extra $600 per laptop, as SanDisk calculates, you, too, can have a flash-drive laptop.

They also use less power, meaning more battery life.

Expect these to get bigger and cheaper.