Following similar announcements by Intel, Samsung, and SanDisk, flash- and module maker Super Talent has announced plans to manufacture 1.8-inch, 2.5-inch, and 3.5-inch drives next month.

The drives are "100 percent compatible" with conventional hard drives, according to Super Talent, and even include a standard Serial ATA interface. The drives will range in capacity up to 32 Gbytes for the 1.8-inch models, to 64 Gbytes for the 2.5-inch models, and up to 128-Gbytes for the 3.5-inch drives -- double SanDisk's capacity points, and four times as large as Intel's notebook drives.

Pricing, however, remains a mystery. According to Joe James, marketing director for the company, Super Talent will announce the price of the new drives in April. "Why put out pricing now? The market may move 30 percent in a month," James said.

While rival SanDisk has said that it expects the prices of flash memory to drop further, historically flash memory has been a haven from the steadily-decreasing price of DRAM. Executives at a flash conference tied flash memory to the steadily growing demand for portable content, and Micron, Intel, and Samsung have steadily increased their flash manufacturing capacity to capitalize on the higher-margin devices.

Super Talent's product offerings include seven models, keyed to the 16-, 32-, 64-, and 128-Gbyte capacity points. According to James, SanDisk currently holds a performance advantage, restricting to Super Talent to industrial and embedded applications where performance isn't as critical. In May, however, the drives will be refreshed with a new storage controller, increasing their performance from their current levels of 28 Mbytes per second to about 60 Mbytes per second, the current performance of the SanDisk drives, James said.