No more long waits for your PC to wake up. Longer laptop battery life. Data that survives a drop. These are the promises of solid-state-memory disks (SSDs), which use flash memory to supplement or replace today"s hard drives.
Samsung is working on two types of products: pure SSDs and hybrid drives that combine traditional hard disks and flash memory. Pure SSDs give you all the benefits listed above but cost a lot more than today"s drives. Hybrids will offer extended battery life and faster boot-ups, but should have only a small price premium (if any).
Gigabyte takes another approach: a PCI card with RAM that your system can use as a drive. The card should offer faster data access, plus energy savings, but it needs constant power to store your files.