I don't know whether to shout for joy or cry from sadness. Samsung has announced the world's first PC with a NAND flash-based solid state disk (SSD). The joy comes from the fact that the 32GB SSD makes Samsung's 12.1", 2.56 pound Q30 notebook completely silent. With the spinning hard disk drive gone, there is absolutely no noise. In addition, the SSD can withstand twice the impact force of a traditional hard drive, offers 300% faster reads (53MB/sec) and 150% faster writes (28MB/sec), boots into Windows XP 25-50% faster and weighs roughly half as much.
So how could I possibly be sad with all of these positives? Samsung has decided to throw the 32GB SSD into its ancient (in the computer world) Q30 notebook. This means that the notebook is based around the outdated 915GMS chipset and features Intel GMA900 graphics. That also means that memory is limited to DDR2 400 spec. The processor also is a rather meager 1.2GHz Celeron M 753. Not even a Pentium M at least?
For now, it appears that the Q30-SSD is a Korean market only notebook. That may be for the best as its $3,700 USD price tag would surely make potential buyers do a double take -- especially given the outdated components surrounding the fabulous storage disk.
