Sony has taken another step into the solid state drive market, announcing plans to offer a flash-based drive option in its Vaio Type-G (Japanese) lightweight business notebooks. However, for now the SSD drives will only be available via Sony Japan’s built-to-order service, and the company doesn’t have any plans to offer the drives to overseas customers. The SSD option will also be expensive, with customers forking over a nearly $550 premium (¥65,000) to use a 32 GB flash drive rather than a traditional 40 GB hard drive.
The Vaio Type-Gs were introduced last year, and sport a 12.1 inch screen, a 1.2 GHz Celeron processor, and a total weight of just 898 grams (that’s under two pounds). The solid state drive actually lightens the Type-G Vaio still further, shaving an additional 39 grams off is weight.
The Vaio Type-G is the first notebook computer from Sony with a solid state drive, although the company also put a 16 GB solid state drive into tits Vaio UX90 ultraportable, which it introduced nine months ago.
