For two decades, PC data storage has meant hard disk drives, but big changes are coming quickly. Solid-state flash memory -- the same technology used in thumb drives and storage cards for digital cameras -- will begin to make inroads on notebooks next year.

Better performance is a primary reason, according to Paul Moore. "Turbo memory, ReadyBoost, hybrid hard drives, solid state drives -- these will boost performance by reducing latency, and by not spinning the drive so much, they'll conserve power," he says. Flash already plays several roles in a PC. Microsoft Vista's "ReadyBoost" and "ReadyDrive" can use USB drives and hybrid hard drives (HHDs) that combine flash cache with rotating-disk storage as a cache to speed up boot-ups and application loading. Intel uses flash memory for an internal cache called Turbo Memory in its Centrino PRo platform. Solid-state drives (SSDs) replace moving parts completely.

The cost of a substantial helping of flash storage is still higher than a similar amount of rotating disk, but the price of flash memory has dropped rapidly over the past couple of years and continues to fall. In January of this year, SanDisk unveiled a 32GB SSD drive the company estimated would add $600 to the price of a laptop, or about $19 a gigabyte. But in just three months, when it announced a version with a serial ATA interface, the price had fallen to $350 wholesale.

Solid-state drives are getting bigger, as well. In June, 2007, San Disk and Samsung both launched 64GB SSDs for notebook PCs. Fujitsu's Moore says that, by the end of 2008, he expects to see affordable SSD storage in capacities that will be reaching 100GB, at a price that will drop rapidly as they become more popular. Analyst organization IDC is bullish on solid-state drives: It predicts that the market for SSD will grow at a 71% annual rate for the next five years.

Dell was one of the first notebook makers to offer SSDs: In April, 2007, it began shipping the Latitude D420 and D620 ATG notebooks with 1.8-inch 32GB SanDisk solid state drives. Next year both SanDisk and Dell will find they have a great deal of competition -- storagesearch.com lists 26 makers of SSDs in the standard 2.5-inch notebook drive form factor; more, it notes, than the number of companies that make 2.5-inch hard drives.

Given the cost premium, SSDs won't be a consumer item next year, says Leslie Fiering, but they will have a quick impact, as SSD pays for itself almost immediately in durability in the bump-and-drop environments where tablets are used.

The vast majority of next year's notebooks will have hard drives, of course, but there will be change here, as well -- they'll likely have bigger ones. Last year, 60GB or 80GB was the sweet spot for laptop drives. That won't change much for mid-size and smaller notebooks, particularly as they slim down. But by next year, says Fujitsu's Paul Moore, 2.5-inch drives with capacities around 250GB will begin to appear in laptops that can accommodate them: the desktop replacements and supersized media machines.