Before we begin, don’t forget next Tuesday’s (March 20th) monthly meeting of MMOOS, our local Apple User Group. We’ll meet at 6:30 PM in Bldg. 25 of the Thornton Oaks Retirement Community in Brunswick. Our feature program is entitled “iWeb: The Internet Is Calling”. MMOOS members Carol Jones and Christine Macchi will explore iWeb, Apple’s simple yet powerful web site creation tool “for the rest of us”. We’ll also get caught up on the latest Apple news and, as usual, give away some fun door prizes. See you there.

Now, on to the “headline news”. It seems the traditional hard drive, long the standard method of storing data on computers, is in for some, shall we say, stiff competition. I use the word “stiff” because the new kid on the block has no moving parts.

Traditional hard drives consist of one or two platters that hold data. They spin around, and a stylus moves over the platter surfaces, extracting and storing data. The tiny motors that spin the disk and move the stylus, of course, use electricity. Any time your notebook computer or iPod has to access the hard drive for data, battery life suffers.

Enter the new Solid-State Drive. Instead of rotating platters, Solid-State drives store information in static NAND flash memory chips, similar to the memory in your digital camera or iPod nano. What turns flash memory into a Solid-State drive is an internal controller to manage the in-an-out flow of data and an interface that allows it to completely replace the hard drive in, say, a notebook computer. Solid-State drives use substantially less power (up to one-half) than hard drives, increasing battery life. Some models use the same interface and are the same physical size as hard drives, making them easy drop-in replacements for notebook computer users.

There are a couple of downsides, as is to be expected when considering early adoption of emerging technology. One is storage capacity. The 80GB hard drive on my PowerBook is constantly full. The first Solid-State drive offerings max out at only 32GB. My guess is a full Mac OS X or Windows Vista installation will eat that 32GB up pretty quick.

The second downside is price. SanDisk’s 32GB Solid-State drive (with an SATA interface just like the MacBook’s, for example) will cost manufacturers $350. That means even higher prices for us consumer types.