Dell, one of the world’s largest makers of personal computers, has announced that it would install flash-based solid state drives into select laptops in order to ensure that those machines have lighter weight and higher durability.

“A solid state drive is an excellent storage technology for our mobile users. We are committed to leading the industry in delivering these new drives and will offer them across Dell's next generation of Latitude products,” said Kevin Kettler, chief technology officer at Dell.

Dell said that it is offering a 1.8” 32GB solid state drive (SSD) from SanDisk on certain Latitude D420 ultra-mobile and D620 ATG semi-rugged notebooks. The company is one the first to offer a flash-based drive as an alternative to hard disk drives (HDD) on corporate notebooks.

A SSD is a hard drive alternative based on flash memory. Unlike a traditional HDD which uses spinning discs and read/write heads, a SSD is designed with flash memory with no moving parts. The new drive has the same shape and size as a HDD and uses the same connectors for integration into existing systems.

According to Dell, engineering tests show that the SSD has an operating shock tolerance of up to 1300Gs, which is twice the rating of mechanical drives. . In addition, the drives are predicted to reduce the probability of failure by three-and-one-half times compared to standard mechanical drives. The new drives can also increase system performance by up to 23% and decreases boot time by up to 34% compared to traditional HDDs available with the Latitude D420 and D620 ATG.