Flash-based harddisks - the new laptop feature to look for

A review in ComputerWorld features the new Samsung's 64 GB Flash drive:

Samsung rates the drive with a read speed of 100MB/sec and write speed of 80 MB/sec, compared to 59MB/sec and 60MB/sec (respectively) for a traditional 2.5" hard drive. We ran several benchmarks. In our HD Tune performance tests, the drive turned in an average transfer speed of 28.6 MB/sec with .3ms average access time. Burst speed was 25.5MB/sec with 4.5% CPU utilization. HD Tach tests using both 8MB and 32MB blocks for testing measured the burst speed at 30.8MB/sec, the average sequential read speed at 28.0MB/sec. HD Tach won't measure write speeds on primary drives, so we turned to Fresh Diagnose , which reported an average write speed of 11.65 MB/sec.

With such a spectacular performance, it's easy to see why Flash drives will become the next top-of-the-line feature in any high-end laptop, maybe more important than a high-speed CPU.