Bitmicro announced today plans to launch a new series of 3.5-inch solid state drives. They are promising capacities of 1.6TB (that’s 1600GB) and transfer speeds up to 320MB/second. The new drive, dubbed ‘E-Disc Altima Ultra320 SCSI SSD,’ will also be able to withstand harsh conditions.

Given the prices of current SSDs, you can expect these to cost in the thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yes, that means that consumers probably won’t be buying these anytime soon. The drives are aimed at military applications and other high-budget industries.

We’re hoping to see these make it to computers in our lifetime, and are awaiting a 2.5-inch version for laptops as well. We do tend to be pretty optimistic though.

Starting mid-February, business customers will be able to order HP’s Compaq dc7800 ultra-slim PC with an SSD drive. We aren’t sure what the drive size will be, but 32GB seems to be a good estimate seeing as the price increase is about $500.

This is the beginning of putting SSDs in our computers, with more and more expected to start showing up soon. Hopefully 2008 will turn out to be the year of the solid state disk, as we can’t wait to put these puppies in our laptops.

Joel Levin has written a great article about what he thinks will be the 10 prominent features in our next generation laptops. Included are a 40 hour battery, USB 3.0, Blu-ray drive, SSD, and new kinds of memory, among others.

I’m looking forward to seeing a laptop with all of these features released. I’m guessing it will be instant-on, with a great looking screen, and it will be screaming with power, from the processor down to the hard drive.