And so the flash memory revolution begins. Dell has announced that they will now be offering their Latitude D420 Ultra-Mobile Laptop with a 32GB Solid State Drive (SSD) in place of a conventional hard drive. This is an option, of course, so if you still want a magnetic spinning platter to store your data, that will still be available.

The 32GB SSD (1.8-inch) comes courtesy of the good people at SanDisk and has the same shape and size as the old HDD, except that it uses flash memory and has no moving parts. This means that it has a higher shock tolerance (up to 1,300Gs). As you recall, SSDs are also said to provide a 23% increase in system performance and a 34% improvement in boot time.

Dell announced that the 1.8-inch SanDisk SSD will be available for the rugged Latitude D620 ATG too. In either case, the flash-based drive will cost you $549.