This will be really good news: As the price of flash-memory based hard drives continues to drop, we’ll start to see them at larger sizes in regular business laptops.

Known as “SSD”, for Solid-State Drive (meaning no moving parts), flash-memory based hard drives are already pretty common in “netbooks” – very small laptops used for simpler computing, with smaller screens and less power. The good news is that we’re not too far from seeing them going mainstream, where regular business and home user class notebooks will have SSDs in the 100GB-plus storage range.

SSDs are faster, lighter, have no moving parts, and need less power so batteries last longer. All good stuff and an imporovement over traditional mechanical hard drives.

Fast Company magazine has a good rundown of the current state of SSDs here.

The article states:
At some point within the next two years, [Brian Beard, flash marketing manager of Samsung Semiconductors] predicts price parity between an SSD and HDD for the amount of storage the average user needs in a computer. And at that point the speedier-access times, improved ruggedness and lower power demands of solid-state drives will mean they’ll be favored over hard disk storage.

And that’ll be a great improvement. We’ll keep you posted!

For more information, here is a Wikipedia page describing Solid-State Drives.