"Jay Honeck" wrote in message
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So, dammit, that forced us to consider the new "solid state" tablet PCs
that utilize "flash memory" instead of hard drives. However, for
reasons known only to the manufacturers, these units cost $1000 MORE
than their hard-drive-equipped equivalents -- even though they have far
fewer moving parts.

For what it's worth, fewer moving parts in *no* way implies lower cost in
the electronics world. There are two primary factors: cost of
manufacturing, and degree of competition.

In the case of flash-based hard drives, the actual parts cost is MUCH higher
than for conventional drives, especially on a per-gigabyte basis. In
addition, only a portion of all of the major hard drive manufacturers are
actually selling flash-based hard drives at this point. There's relatively
little competition in that market right now.

In the near future, I fully expect that market to expand somewhat, and in
fact other manufacturers known more for their RAM products and not for hard
drives are likely to enter the market and create more competition. But
until flash-based hard drives have similar capacities as conventional
drives, there won't be enough demand to motivate a large number of competing
manufacturers, and certainly for the near-term it's absolutely true that PCs
using flash-based drives are going to much more expensive, mostly as a
result of the cost of the drives themselves. Fewer moving parts doesn't
help anything here.

Also for what it's worth, while it may not be practical for you (depends on
how comfortable you are taking apart your tablet PC), IMHO the altitude
issue is, while real, not a huge impediment, especially for someone flying a
normally-aspirated aircraft as you are.

Conventional hard drives ought to lose very little lifetime up to about
10,000', and even beyond that it's not like high-altitude flight is going to
kill the drive outright. I don't doubt that the chances of a drive failure
are increased, but there's always that chance regardless, and plenty of
other environmental factors, including cold, heat, and vibration are also
working to break your drive, regardless of altitude.

Which is a long way of saying, if you're using a PC with a conventional hard
drive, you've got a chance of the drive going kaput on you anyway. If it's
important for you to minimize the chances of failure while actually flying,
then with a conventional drive, whether or not it's used at high altitudes,
you need to be monitoring the drive's health (pretty much all modern drives
use the "SMART" hardware monitoring technology, in which the drive can tell
you well before it is unusable that it needs replacing), and just replace
the drive on the ground before it actually fails. If you're flying below
10,000' all the time, you probably won't notice any significant reduction in
lifetime for the drive (but it could still fail).

All that said, even ignoring the altitude issues, flash-based drives are
more reliable than conventional drives. For that matter, that's essentially
what your Garmin 496 uses. The only reason it doesn't cost even more is
that the amount of storage is quite small compared to what you'd find in a
full-blown PC. But you are still paying through the nose for the storage.
If reliability is your top priority, then flash-based systems are the
way to go, and they are justified in their costs, whether you look at it
from a reliability point of view, or cost of manufacturing, or supply and
demand.

Pete