I can't remember if I posted this somewhere else on the forum a long time ago, but I think that these are going to really catch on especially this year, and I believe that next year will see the introduction of 3.5" solid state hard disk drive replacements as a financially viable alternative!

Here is an article posted by the Inq today: http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36891

Oooh, solid state, I'll have to get me one of those!

I'd really like to see the introduction of a 3.5" desktop HDD. What amazes me is that they have managed to manufacture a working 128GB 2.5" HDD. Surely, with the price dropping on flash memory all the time, they could create a 1024GB 3.5" HDD without too much trouble, and make it affordable too.

Quick recap on the benefits of using a solid state drive:

* No noise
* Less heat
* No fragmentation
* Lighter
* Greater resistance to vibration/shock
* Longer MTBF
* No seek time

And the current disadvantages:

* Slower transfer speed (this will improve HUGELY)
* Expensive (like Inq say, the price on the chips drop almost 50% year on year)

Well they could quite easily fit 512GB into a 3.5" bay, it's just a matter of cost. Anyway, laptops are the current best candidate for them, due to power requirements greatly improving laptop battery life.

I hope they drop in price considerably. Would be really nice to see in mainstream.

As for speed, it's just them fine tuning it, it should be considerably faster than disk based memory.

Hmm, I'm thinking this might be something I would look into upgrading on my laptop in the future.

Yeah, I'm hoping they are commonplace by the time I get a laptop so it comes with one... Would increase battery life dramatically.

Maybe end of this year

Would be good if they are... Probably high end laptops first...