LAS VEGAS — Asus’s latest 12.1-inch notebook is special not only because a cow died for it. More interesting for gadget geeks, the notebook can hold a solid state drive over half a terabyte large.
Lined with brown leather, the S121 is part of Asus’s high-end line of 12.1-inch notebooks. The notebook, powered by a 1.3GHz Atom processor, normally ships with a hard disk drive, but Asus offers a 512GB SSD as an optional upgrade.
That’s pretty damn huge for solid state. Just a year ago, the industry was barely breaking double digits in terms of gigabyte capacity for solid state drives. The advantage of solid state is there are no moving parts, which thus makes these drives less fragile and more quiet.
Solid state ain’t cheap, though. Taking Apple’s MacBook Air, for example — upgrading from a 120GB hard disk drive to a 128GB solid state drive costs an additional $500.
Asus’s S101 starts at $1,650 with the default configuration. The company didn’t have a price yet for the SSD option, but I’d estimate you’d have to pay at least an extra $700.
The S101 ships end of January.
See Also:
- SanDisk’s Solid State Drives Make Laptops Better, Faster, Stronger …
- Intel Shrinks Solid State Drive for Mini Notebooks
Photo: Brian X. Chen/Wired.com
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