Keeping up with the major trends of today's mobile world, Dell announced their solid state drive update for the Latitude notebook line-up. The D420 (Ultramobile) and D620 ATG (semi-rugged) will soon incorporate SanDisk's 1,8" 32GB SSD drives. With this strategic move, Dell enters the select world of Flash drive HDD alternatives.

Dell acknowledges the true potential offered by the SSD drives, choosing to integrate such solutions in their Latitude series for increased stability and considerable performance boosts, as well as reduced energy consumption and noise levels.

Dell hardware testers pointed out that the SSD solutions can sustain mechanical shocks up to 1,300 Gs, two times the performance of classical mechanical HDDs. Furthermore, the extreme impact tests demonstrated that the other hardware components found in a notebook fail before the SSD unit, and the added benefit of reduced malfunction rates will cut down on defect-related costs.

The new drives will boost the overall system performance by 23%, at the same time reducing start-up times by 34% as related to conventional HDD. In order to exemplify this, SanDisk claims that their SSD solutions can boot Microsoft Windows Vista Enterprise edition on a laptop in as little as 35 seconds, with an average file access rate of 0.12 milliseconds. In addition, on Windows Experience Index for Microsoft Vista, SanDisk SSD scores 5.4 out of a total 5.9, whereas a hard disk drive scores 3.7 on the same test inside the same laptop. Concerning energy consumption, SanDisk's SSD have an extremely low power consumption rate compared to the hard disk drive: only 0.4W during active operation versus 1.0W. This aspect is crucial in the effort to extend the battery life for the benefit of users who travel a lot.

The updated Latitude notebooks are now available for a €425 starting point in Europe.