Ask the Editors Live forum: Michael Kanellos CNET News.com editor at large, Live!

Just to throw out some stats: flash drives cost a lot more than regular drives. At Dell.com for instance, swapping a 64GB flash drive for a 80GB regular drive adds about $900 to the cost of a notebook. That's double.

Flash at retail costs about 2x to 3x as much. You get a lot with drives. a 1TB drive at retail goes for $259. Or around $4 a GB. Flash drives are 8GB and below and it's about $9 or more. But they are smaller.

At the wholesale level, that 2x 3x cost advantage for drives still holds.

IBM put millipede on the back burner. In a nutshell, tiny actuators would melt a spot on a a surface to register a 1 or 0. You have heat, mechanical movement, etc. It is complex. IBM, however, thinks they have a winner with racetrack memory. In racetrack data gets shuttled up and down on a wire. very dense. 100x over flash. here is a link. http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9915449-7.html?tag=bl

It's the basic technology. In a nutshell, drive guys can get far more GBs in a platter than flash guys can put in a chip. Thus, 100GB of conventional drives don't cost much. It's a platter and some controllers. 100GB of flash would require several chips.

reliability? You can drop flash from a plane and it will survive. regular hard drives won't. regular drives allegedly last far longer in terms of years, but few people will ever wear out their flahs drives.

A lot of people think it will be 2012. It's a combo of both pricing and capacity. Corporate notebook buyers can probably live with 64GB. Thus, when 64GB is cheap enough, it will take off. I think gartner has said it could be ten percent of market by then. Regular drives will have hundreds of GBs and consumers will buy that, but in the corporate world you might see execs give up extra capacity for weight and better battery life. seems like a sensible trade off.

But it's a big if. The memory has been in development for decades. Numonyx, a JV with ST and Intel, says it will have the first chips out this year. Density is good and so are characteristics. But, man, it's a whole new technology. It's not easy to get to global volumes.

they all seem pretty good. For all the knocks you hear about hard drives, they function well. But will see if I can get answer to that. Hitachi still one of the tech leader. It's that IBM heritage. So you can't go wrong. The problem they are facing, though, is sales. You may see them get sold soon.

Flash is just inherently more expensive. Both technologies are also dropping in price at about the same rate and evolving in density about the same rate. It's one of the more difficult races in technology out there. The question is, at what point does it become cheap enough and dense enough to get people to buy it. At that point, flash becomes the notebook storage device, but the drive guys will be selling mondo sized drives for backup storage.

When chips that store data through magnetic principles, you might see flash start to surge closer.

Yes. Flash will definitely help. If flash makers also come out with new enclosures, you will see the size of notebooks drop. Right now, the flash drive guys just use regular notebook cases.

I don't know if it is half of the power. Drives probably consume about 25 percent. Hybrid drives, which combine flash and drives, help somewhat.

One thing that is great about flash drives is the silence. no spinning. I had one for a few weeks and the lack of noise, and the sense of security that the motor wasn't going to conk, were great.

Really? Wow. Unfamiliar with that. NAND flash, the kind used in flash drives, is more subject to errors than NOR or likely regular drives. Also, a lot of giveaway thumb drives probably come with cheap controllers. It might be that instead of the storage medium itself.

Reliabilty is a big issue, though. Flash drive makers don't use multiple cell flash because it is less reliable than single cell. Single cell, however, costs more.

Flash is good for 100,000 cycles. For an MP3 player, that's fine, but for a notebook, it does raise issues. Not for all notebook users--100K is a lot--but some. It is improving, however. Numonyx, which makes phase change memory, says they have conquered that problem. Thus, if the can get volumes up, you might see Numonyx drives that get around that and give you full peace of mind in four or so years.

BAE Systems. Very interesting. They do all those military projects, so if you are in the DoD you might get this in your rugged laptop someday soon.

Man, that'd be one pricey option. Tape and hard drives will be cheaper. Flash is good for speed. in a corporate environment, you'll probably see flash in servers that throw up web pages or run wall street simulations. But data will stay stored on tape or drives.

But that's a good point. you want to back up with flash. The flash industry says that data can stay inside of a flash chip for ten years.

How much more durable are flash drives going to be than hard drives? What will this mean to the consumer?

You have used a notebook with a flash drive as it's main drive. You mentioned it was quiet. Did it seem faster?