Absolutely fantastic idea. Now I see what all the SATA fuss is about.

I always wondered what benefits SATA would bring besides improved airflow due to the reduced cable size. Everybody went nuts over the whole 150MB/s, 300MB/s transfer speeds, but in reality the current hard drives cannot deliver even 80MB/s because of things like buffer size and rotational speed. I guess the only times that these speeds are exceeded is when using a 15K RPM SCSI/SATA hard drive, or 2 x 10K RPM SCSI/SATA hard drive's in a RAID 0 (non-redundancy) configuration.

The world will welcome solid state hard drives with open arms.

What are the benefits?

There are absolutely no moving parts. The data on the 'disk' is accessed like your RAM, at very high speeds! Much, much faster than your 2 x 10K RPM hard drives in RAID 0.

Because there are no moving parts, there is no noise! Say good bye to clicks and coughs when you move large files and open up large or demanding applications! Level load times would be virtually non-existent!

There's no news on it, but I can bet that they don't give out even half of the heat that current mechanical hard drives do.

One thing that has got me quite excited is that by using a solid state drive, you will be using about 95% less power than your old mechanical drive. People have been saying you can expect around 12 hours battery life on a laptop simply by switching to a solid state drive! The only thing that's lacking with them is the price per gigabyte.

Currently, a 16GB 2.5" solid state laptop hard drive will set you back ?380. That's almost ?24/gigabyte, which is a lot of money. You can take a look at this drive by clicking on [url=http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=382429]this link[/url]. I hear that Samsung are working on a 32GB model. You can bet that by the end of 2007 we will potentially be seeing 64GB/128GB solid state disks.

It all makes sense now - why Samsung stopped investing so much in their DRAM and started focusing more on NAND.. most of the other memory manufacturers followed suit.

I'd love to see some benchmarks of these drives! See what they're like in Desktop PC's, Server's etc...

I hope that this sparks some interesting conversations.

As for battery life, take a look at this article: http://www.sciencentral.com/articles/view.php3?type=article&article_id=218392803

And following up on the above article - it appears that the SSD I linked has it's issues, and only maintains a transfer speed of 12MB/s. But remember, equivalent to 100Mbps ethernet. Soon, the drives will be bottlenecked by the ATA bus (which ever one they'll use).

It gets better though, and this technology will only get faster: http://www.bitmicro.com/products_edisk_35_ide.php