Buffalo Technologies announced that the company has no plans of releasing the world's first external storage solution based on NAND flash memory. Called the MiniStation SHD-UHRS, the 100GB device is a solid-state drive enclosed in a polished casing.

It seems that the MiniStation SHD-UHRS that was so proudly displayed on the company's website was just a way of getting feedback from the alleged customers about what products would they like to see in the future. The 2.5-inch form factor solid-state drive will never be sold outside the Japanese market.

The flash-based device is the ideal storage solution especially for notebooks and mobile platforms that support the USB standard. Given the fact that SSD devices are not affected by temperature shifts or even by serious shocks, they can be used anywhere and in any environment. The drive is also smaller, lighter and more energy-efficient than hard-disk drives. However, there is a major drawback that would eventually make the product fail on the market: its $800+ price.

Buffalo has just updated its conventional offering of MiniStation external hard-disk drives with the "half a terabyte in your pocket" 500GB 2.5-inch disk drive. The half a terabyte disk only costs $400 which is truly a good price per Gigabyte. The disk comes with a limited two-year warranty.

The Buffalo 100GB MiniStation SHD-UHRS solid-state drive works almost identically to the classical storage drives. It looks and feels the same with the MiniStation drives announced a while ago, and comes with the same functional industrial design and wrap-around USB cable. The disk can work with both Windows and Leopard operating systems and it is even able to work with Apple's Time Machine backup system.

Despite their popularity, solid-state drives are still extremely expensive. They can be found mostly in high-end mobile computers, such as Dell or Alienware systems. Lately, Lenovo has implemented a 64 GB version of SSD in its latest laptop, the ThinkPad X300.