On Tuesday, PC manufacturer Dell announced that it is offering a 1.8-inch 32GB solid state drive (SSD) from SanDisk on Latitude D420 ultra-mobile and D620 ATG semi-rugged notebooks. Dell is on of the pioneering companies to offer a flash-based drive as an alternative to hard disk drives (HDD) on corporate notebooks.

Dell feels that flash-based drives have immense capability, and the company is therefore committing to offer them across next-generation Latitude notebooks because they enable better reliability, increased performance and noise reduction.

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.