Kingston Technology's Australia and New Zealand regional manager Vaughan Nankivell, said the manufacturer expects to bring a flash hard drive to market by early 2008.
"We've looked at some of the early adopters and [are] keen to follow suit," Nankivell told ZDNet Australia at an event this week and gave indications that its launch window could be as early as this year.
Flash drives, such as Sandisk's (above) may increase battery life by about 10 percent.
Flash hard drives have been announced by other memory manufacturers in the past. In January, Sandisk released a 32GB drive for commercial notebooks. The drive, would add about US$600 to the cost of a notebook and, unlike traditional hard drives, does not contain moving parts. As a result, flash devices are less prone to breaking down, can survive drops from great heights and consume less energy.
Other manufacturers to announced flash hard drives include Intel, Samsung and Dell. Hitachi executives have previously claimed 1TB drives to be on the horizon.
Nankivell also declared that the DDR3 "wave" is coming and Kingston will debut the next generation of memory modules at the Computex event in Taipei in June.
DDR3 -- or double-data-rate three synchronous dynamic random access memory -- an improvement over the current-generation DDR2 will, according to Nankivell, see a speed increase from 12.8GB/s to over 20GB/s, a operating-voltage drop from 1.8v to 1.5v and a saving of approximately 30 percent less power, resulting in energy and heat reductions.
Referring to data supplied by analyst firm iSuppli, he said that "DD3 will account for 25 percent of total DRAM shipments by the end of 2008 and dominate the market by 2010", adding that demand for higher performance memory will increase with 64-bit applications becoming more commonplace, and as Intel drives demand through new platforms.
Kingston, headquartered in Fountain Valley, California, is the largest independent manufacturer of memory products and currently holds approximately 16 percent of the worldwide DRAM (dynamic random access memory) module market.
Michael Kanellos from CNET News.com contributed to this article.
