Microsoft wants hard drives of the future to come with Flash memory
Besides requiring customers to buy crazy advanced new PCs that may or may not exist when the next version of Windows comes out in a couple of years, Microsoft is also trying to get hard drive manufacturers to start building banks of Flash memory alongside their hard drives so that these PCs of the future can use a feature called "SuperFetch" which tries to predict what data is needed next and store it in a special cache. You could just do it with some of the 2GB of RAM that a PC running Longhorn will require, but using Flash memory would save power and reduce the risk of any accidental loss of data.
