Seagate Technology LLC plans to add solid-state drives based on flash memory chips to its lineup of storage products sometime in 2008, the company said Thursday ? IDG News Service

“We have solid-state drives on every road map that we have,” Bill Watkins, the company’s CEO, told The Wall Street Journal in an interview.

Solid-state drives, AKA SSDs, use flash memory like those in your flash drives instead of magnetic disks. Flash memory is non-volatile, meaning retention of information does not require power. They offer a couple of advantages over our platter-based drives? they?re lighter, need less power and are more durable making mobile devices their top application. These cost more than the average magnetic-disk based drives and currently have a fraction of the capacity but current improvements in technology continue to drag the price down as well as pack more bytes into the package.

Seagate currently has hybrid drives in the product line, which combines flash memory with magnetic disks, namely the Momentus 5400 PSD.

A desktop computer is so not in fashion, after the laptops got so affordable. It is like the car cd mp3 players, who have lost their value after the ipods with no batteries issue. The online dvd rental is also a long forgotten story.