Toshiba Laptop with 8 Hours on ONE Charge

[happywonton]

Ultra Low-Power Toshiba: 8 hr Battery Life

Toshiba's new Portégé R500 will be on sale soon with an option for the lowest-power laptop I've ever seen from a major manufacturer. The high-end laptop weighs less than two pounds and can operate for a whopping 8 hours on a single battery charge.

But, of course, it's not a special batter that keeps the laptop alive, it's just that the laptop uses so little power. Two innovations make this possible. First, ultra-efficient LED back lighting which also makes the screen more crisp even in full sun. And second, the computer doesn't use a hard drive. Instead of the constant spinning up and down of a normal laptop, the Portégé R500 uses a 64 GB solid state flash drive.

Solid state drives are not only more efficient, they're also faster and lighter, making the entire package more appealing. Of course, it has to be a LOT more appealing, as the flash drive ads $600 to the price of the Portégé R500 with a regular hard drive.

It's quite a premium, but for the truly power-conscious, high-end consumer, there's finally a solid state option. And there's a lot of room for improvement, as flash drives are getting bigger and cheaper every day. Don't be surprised if Mac heads in this direction fairly soon. The increase in speed and efficiency alone are making this a really hot area for development right now.

Via TreeHugger

Source: http://green.yahoo.com/index.php?q=node/1304

[AYHJA]

Solid state drives are definitely what's up, I can't wait for them to become the norm so that regular harddrives can go down...Build my supersever... :D

[Sir Jig-A-Lot]

luv the technical specs on this & what people around the net are saying about it. might be one of these i'll have to grab when i finally get a lappy.when it drops down in price of course. i ain't no g..g..gigolo [huh sucker] ;)

[jdog]

Solid state drives are not only more efficient, they're also faster and lighter, making the entire package more appealing. Of course, it has to be a LOT more appealing, as the flash drive ads $600 to the price of the Portégé R500 with a regular hard drive.

It's quite a premium, but for the truly power-conscious, high-end consumer, there's finally a solid state option. And there's a lot of room for improvement, as flash drives are getting bigger and cheaper every day. Don't be surprised if Mac heads in this direction fairly soon. The increase in speed and efficiency alone are making this a really hot area for development right now.

They have virtually zero access times but transfer rates are only slightly faster than normal hard drives. They add more than 10X the cost and power isn't a factor as disc laptop hard drives use up a mere 3W under load anyway.

[BlindG]

If, for every time I saw AYHJA getting cheerleader-happy over a new computer-related product, I had a cent, I'd be a millionaire....

How many times do we have to repeat that HARD DISKS THE WAY WE KNOW THEM ARE HERE TO STAY.
If you look back, they are the only product in the years of home computers (and not only) that have sustained so few changes in their designs and implementations.
How can you compare a flash memory to a disk, TODAY, it's really beyond me.
Such technologies are still in baby state with very few implementations that are not -yet- well tested, that are expensive beyond reach and that can't compete in many ways to the current sets of products!

How can you be SO HAPPY with a product that lists: (from wikipedia)

Price - As of early 2007, flash memory prices are still considerably higher per gigabyte than those of comparable conventional hard drives - around $8 per GB compared to about $0.25 for mechanical drives.

Capacity - The capacity of SSDs tends to be significantly smaller than the capacity of HDDs.

Lower recoverability - After mechanical failure the data is completely lost as the cell is destroyed, while if normal HDD suffers mechanical failure the data is often recoverable using expert help. Subsequent investigations in to this field, however, have found that data can be recovered from SSD memory. Investigation into this from Disklabs [8] Data Recovery means that SSD memory can be read, re-written and sampled back together. It is true that there may be some data loss, but it is also true that often, all data can be retreived.

Vulnerability against certain types of effects, including abrupt power loss (especially DRAM based SSDs), magnetic fields and electric/static charges compared to normal HDDs (which store the data inside a Faraday cage).

Slower than conventional disks on sequential I/O, the latest perpendicular hard disks doing about 150 Megabytes/sec read, with the latest SSDs doing about 100 Megabytes/sec read.

Limited write cycles. Typical Flash storage will typically wear out after 100,000-300,000 write cycles, while high endurance Flash storage is often marketed with endurance of 1-5 million write cycles (many log files, file allocation tables, and other commonly used parts of the file system exceed this over the lifetime of a computer). Special file systems or firmware designs can mitigate this problem by spreading writes over the entire device, rather than rewriting files in place. [2]

Where 5 out of 6 are CRUCIAL and include the vast amount of home users and not only corporate ones.

Save the cheerleading dances for when we'll have alive substance memories or quantum based memories. Till then, recent (since 80GB Sata drives) WD models have very little consumption, VERY LOW noise levels and if ventilated, prolonged life and really high and reliable performance.

WD HDD FTW!!!!