Solid State Drives are a new technology which seems to have a huge advantage over older hard drive technology. The biggest advantage, in my opinion, having no moving parts. Although I backup my data regularly, it's been pretty common for a hard drive to just break down eventually (I've owned Maxtor, Hitachi, Western Digital, and Seagate - various laptop hard drives as well). Solid State also offers faster data access than any of the other Hard Drives on the market. The only negative is it's high price per GB of storage. There are also much fewer high capacity storage devices available as SSD. This is just for now, and it seems that like all blooming technologies this will change rather quickly. I'm already planning on having an SSD replace my Raptors on a new build in the future. One other benefit I forgot to add: the size of these drives allow them to fit into notebooks, and there are some micro notebooks that are employing this technology (though they use very small capacity drives - which limit the laptops OS choice greatly). Just want to know what everyone things about SSD and the future of hard drives.
Obsolescence Over the course of my lifetime I have gone from 78s to MP3s, B/W to HDTV, 640KB 5-1/4 floppies to 1TB HDDs, and from DOS 3.0 to Win7 beta. In the interim, I did not necessarily upgrade (I have no 8-track tapes) Several years ago, an MIT prof (whose name eludes me) advanced a principle of obsolescence for technology that declared that technology becomes obsolete within six months of its release. Philosophers have long since observed that every ten years the totality of our knowledge increases four times. I think that, for the most, we who are swimming in this primordial soup tend to jump on the technological bandwagon if and/or when its suits our purposes and resources. Speaking of resources, SS HDDs currently run from $2-6/GB; an internal SATA HDD: 11 cents/GB; I be waiting for the price to come down! By the time the price for SS HDDs come down (forecasts say 1, more like 2 years) something else may be in the process of being released. For example, I have read articles postulating that storage will eventually be integrated with the northbridge. I currently have 1.8TBs of storage which I will surely not consume by the time I die. Furthermore, I have never experienced a HDD failure, probably because I upgraded my capacity long before the gears had a chance to grind to a halt. Therefore, I do not envision myself converting to SS because its advantages do not pique my requirements and its cost/GB insults my pragmatic bent. Not that it's pragmatic, but I am more interested in keeping my mobo/CPU/graphics card up to date. Monk