Dell starts rolling out SSD for some Latitude notebooks

To regain marketshare Dell is listening more and more to what its consumers want. A few weeks ago they announced they will soon ship PCs with Linux, a couple of days ago they announced they will start shipping PCs with Windows XP again and today Dell says it will start giving consumers the option to order notebooks with solid state disks.

Currently the option is only available on the Dell Latitude D420 and D620 ATG semi-rugged notebooks. Dell uses the SanDisk 1.8-inch 32GB SSD, this option is available for $450 more than the standard 60GB HDD.

Dell says the SSD has an operating shock tolerance of up to 1,300 Gs, which is twice as much as regular mechanical hard drives. In fact, during extreme tests they found out that the surrounding notebook hardware breaks before the SSD. The drives are 3.5x more reliable than mechanical drives and are expected to boost performance by up to 23 percent. Additionally, they also cut boot times by up to 34 percent.