More details on Samsung's solid-state drive (SSD) and hybrid drives, which promise a massive performance increase at minimal cost if the company is to be believed. It had two SSDs on show at Winhec, one 16GByte and the other 32Gbyte, both available as 1.8in or 2.5in packages. Capacities go down to 4Gyte.

Prices will be in line with standalone flash prices, currently $20-25 a gig, according to the man on Samsung's Winhec booth.

That makes a complete solid-state mobile well affordable at the high-end of the market. But Otto Berkes, general manager of Microsoft's Ultra-Mobile PC division, (of whom I'll write more later today), said the software is not quite ready for them yet.

He explained: 'We have some work to do to optimise the operating system for flash because the read and write characteristics are very different from those of a hard disk.'

Samsung says its SSDs can be read at 57MByte/sec and written at 32MByte/sec.

The Samsung hybrid drives, pictured above left, come in capacities of 80Gbyte, 120Gyte and 160Gbyte. Samsung says their average power consumption is 0.24W compared with an average 1.2W of a hard disk, promising an average 14percent improvement in battery life. The drives uses a Serial ATA 1.5G interface.

The performance boost is greatest with 'seek intensive' activities, when there are a lot of disk accesses, according to the man on Samsung's stand. Boot-ups are seek intensive, so we should be able to get into our machines a lot quicker.