I have seen the future, and it's SSD

Well, I agree and disagree.

First, I disagree "This will take some getting used to". No - but I agree that it will be really nice!

My first PC (not mac) took ca 2 seconds to boot. And that was 26 years ago. The boot time since then have been getting longer and longer. At work it is horrible - between 5 to 20 minutes (windows, traditional disks) - at home close to 32 seconds - but with traditional disks and Linux.

Anyway, SSD are going to be mainstream soon. In my case, it is not boot time, but I/O for virtual environment, my 1/4 million photos from events - that I like to look through, plus a lot more.

And the price will fall. Of course.

I have an Intel 80GB SSD (gen 1) in my 2007 Macbook (black/4GB ram) and it screams! Boots average 11 seconds, loading a few apps & auto login. Almost every app launches instantly. Been using it for 7 months. Why is this news now?

This is the future.

Looking for micro soldering pros

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'faster booting' - err what is this 'booting'. Is it the thing I do a few times a year where the machine beeps and whirrs for a moment before coming back to life?

SSDs are *not* the future - except possibly the short term future. While there are still machines with these silly restricted tubes between the main memory and the big memory, hard discs are acceptable and SSDs are (to an extent) better. The *real* future is to forget the entire model of 'disk' and just put the non-volatile memory on the main bus. WIth 64bit OS support now commonplace, there really isn't any point at all in sequestering some memory away at the end of a slow pipe. I suppose a lot of legacy code support would be needed to pretend that those quaint 'file' things exist for a while but really - a simple large database that lives in a few TB of NVRAM sitting on your address and data busses would be so much better. Think how much simpler memory-mapping a 'file' would become! Consider how much space could be saved by not having this nonsense of minimum file allocation blocks. It should be cheaper too; no need to wrap your flash in a box to pretend it is a disc. No need for a disc adaptor. Lighter . Quieter.

And no you can't patent it, because I just disclosed it in a public forum.

I'm in the "too small, too pricey" camp. No doubt current SSDs are sweet, but unlike a lot of people commenting here apparently, my primary computer is a laptop because I have to take my work to my customers all the time.

I don't care how fast it is, or if I can load the OS and Photoshop and an entire client presentation in inDesign in under 40 seconds; if I have to lug around an external HDD to store my stuff on then what's the point? I'm having a hard time living with the 500GB 7200RPM drive (aftermarket mod) I have now and it's not because it's not fast enough.
I give it a couple more years, when we're seeing 500GB+ SSDs for under $500 then I'll bite. It's only going to get cheaper, faster and with larger storage capacity. I can wait.

I've had 3 SSDs in laptops.

A Runcore 32Gb in a Dell Vostro A90, hackintosh. It made the little thing usable, and scored a Disk Test result of 61 on XBench 1.3.

I also had a Transcend 64GB in an old TiPB 1Ghz, which gave it some added life, and scored around 80 on XBench.

My latest SSD is an Intel X25-V, 40GB. It's by far the best. Makes my 2007 Macbook boot in just 25 secs, where it used to boot in 65 secs. It scores 137 on XBench.

I'm thinking of getting one for my MBA.

I have a 13" MBP clocked at 2.53 GHz with 4GB of RAM and with Snow Leopard, my machine starts up WAY faster with its hard drive than the machine used in the video. The only thing that would prompt me to switch to a SSD would be if you hit the power button and the machine was ready to go instantly.

"If you have a screamingly fast CPU with a poky drive, you have a poky computer as the chain is only as good as its weakest link."

I think this article might be misleading. If your HD is slow it doesn't really effect your ability to max out your CPU. It doesn't literally slow down your whole computer.

You are still likely to be able to encode a video at the exact same speed.

Having a slow HD only slows down your ability to access files on your HD. Anything that doesn't depend on access speed will run the same speed on your $999 SSD as it does on your $50 platter drive.

I am pondering getting a SSD drive for traveling. I will be on a bike, the drive will need to handle alot of bumpy road travel. Having a drive with no moving parts seems like a good idea. Any thoughts on using a SSD drive for a bike tour?

7% of all hard disks fail every year. Some of the failures are for what seems ridiculous (poor air quality in the region at the time the disk was manufactured). When a hard disk fails, your data is gone unless you have a backup. People wanted a cheap storage solution and so that is what they got. It is not a satisfactory one for me.