MOOLY Eden, Intel’s vice president and general manager, Mobile Platforms Group, chose solid-state drive (SSD) over mechanical drive, saying the move was inevitable considering the many advantages it offers over the latter.

I couldn’t agree more with his decision, which is a logical choice moving forward. But what I was most dissatisfied about was Intel’s choice of going NAND (licensed from Micron Technologies) rather than flash or even their own StrataFlash memory.

Many years ago, most Windows-based handhelds were using Intel’s StrataFlash and if there’s one thing about these memory, they are fast and robust – you could flash upgrade your handheld countless times and not worry about a performance degradation.

When NAND came into the picture, manufacturers decided to use the cheaper NAND. Since it was so cheap, they switched entirely to NAND even for the high-end offerings.

Apart from being slower, NAND also has limited write cycles. Following the introduction of this slower memory, manufacturers also introduced a progress bar during the startup screen.

Many moons later, Microsoft introduced Windows Mobile 5 (WM5) to replace the ageing Windows Mobile 2003 platform.

WM5 introduced a few nifty functions but rather than a mere software upgrade, it turned the Pocket PC into more of a PC than a handheld – WM5 would save data to the non-volatile memory (the built-in NAND flash memory of the handheld machine which shows up in File Explorer as additional storage) much like how a PC would write data to hard disk rather than store working data on the RAM in standby mode.

So by not having to maintain a constant flow of power to the volatile memory, WM5 could actually save you more power when you weren’t using your handheld. Brilliant!

As manufacturers were already using NAND, users paid a hefty penalty when they wanted to flash upgrade their Windows Mobile 2003 machine to WM5.

While the manufacturer was mostly to blame for how they implemented the WM5 upgrade, a more serious reason was lurking behind it all, NAND was ultimately slow and causing all sorts of disfunctions with the handheld.

Despite all the tricks, hacks and software patches that handheld enthusiasts and usergroups device for the little iPaq, nothing worked. If you ran Garmin’s Que on your iPaq, it would “stall” in the middle of a road navigation for several seconds before resuming operations – by then you would have already taken the wrong turn south-bound to Johor Baru!

As a hard disk replacement for the PC platform however, NAND is still solid state memory and is faster than any hard disk today. Sadly, I can’t help but think of all my bad experiences with NAND each time manufacturers brought the subject up!

Truth be told, I was rather expecting Intel to adopt the industry standard Flash memory such as those implemented in memory cards instead of NAND. Flash is cheap and getting cheaper by the day, also it’s a tried and tested technology.

It’s still too early to pass comments on the new SSDs, it has the same dimensions and even it felt a bit more hefty than a comparable 2.5-inch notebook hard disk.

For many, buying a high-end notebook with SSD would mean tremendous power-savings and performance boost for the notebook, reliability should also be better than a mechanical drive since the SSD has no moving parts.

But the question on how reliable NAND would hold up to the amount of read/writes of a typical notebook hard disk still eludes me.