SCSI and SATA used to be high priced enthusiast drives as well, that changed. SSD's are just expensive because they are new. Give it 3-4 years and you'll start to see them in EVERYTHING.

<em>greater durability</em>
O'realy? You should say this to the mass of complaining people all over the Intertubes that say they SSDs died in very, very short times. Ridiculous is the claim that SSD are superior than HDD. They are faster and more reliable, indeed, but for all the other things there is no match with the magnetic disks.
HDD are cheaper, long-lasting (a magnetic bit tends to last waaaaaaay more than a bunch of rotting NAND memory cells), with a currently unbeatable (and so it will be for the years to come, they say) price:GB ratio, cheaper, cheaper, and again way too much cheaper :-P

SCSI drives (well, SAS, nowadays, I guess) are still not commonplace other than for servers, and even then SATA are pretty common as SAS controllers can use both types of drives.

Not if it requires PCI-E you won't. While the general principal of solid state storage will undoubtedly prevail, I don't think those that take off will bear much more than a passing resemblance to present SSDs.

Take a machine with a SSD and drop it on the ground while it is writing data, nothing will happen to it. Do the same thing with a standard HDD, good luck recovering your corrupted data. That's what greater durability means.

From the article:
**Solid State Drives DO NOT require defragmentation. It may decrease the lifespan of the drive. Please visit our SSD support forums for more information.
Umm, if you put NTFS on them then yes they do. Anything that has crappy NTFS on it has to be defragmented. It's not like SSDs have magic anti-fragmentation pixie dust. Fragmentation comes from the way NTFS organizes files on a drive. It's not a design limitation of hard drives seeing as how NTFS is the only filesystem that even has this problem.
But the article is write, defragging would kill an SSD pretty fast.

no you do not defragment the drive. just don't. it doesn't matter whether files are written randomly on ssd. the access speed is equal no matter on what part of the disk it is written.
on hdd it matters/

Lol, every time I ear this kind of argument I think "what's the matter with this guy"? :-D Seriously, this is just advertising crap, we're talking about computers here and GENERALLY computers aren't meant to be dropped on the ground while they're fired up....
And again, SSDs are a stupid placebo with no effect on the storage technology evolution. The future of hard disks is PCM memory.

Fun with SSD's, and a boatload of cash

I love how they add the fire extinguisher to the list of tools needed.

It is absolutely not advertising crap, it is fact that standard HDDs with their moving parts are affected movement and impacts. It doesn't matter that a notebook is not supposed to be dropped when the reality is, accidents happen and people do drop them. SSDs eliminate that as an issue. Then there's also the fact that HDDs use more power and create more heat thanks to their moving parts which SSDs also completely eliminate.SSDs may not end up being the next hard drive standard (only time will tell) but they are an important step along the way to it, in terms of setting the goals we want the "next big thing" to achieve, kind of like the way the first transistors were an important step along the way from vacuum tubes to the modern silicon based processor.

Fragmentation is a result of the way a standard hard drive works, not NTFS (never mind the fact that fragmentation can happen with any files system). As the disks in the drive spin, data is written to it in multiple passes, so a single file can end up broken up across multiple sections of the platter. Without moving platters, a SSD just writes the file to open contiguous empty space. The act of deleting files can certainly leave blank spaces between the files, but that's not fragmentation.

From what I understand, that's not true. Fragmentation comes from NTFS. What it does is it starts writing a file to the first open space from the start of the platter regardless of whether or not that space is big enough. So if there isn't enough space, it writes what it can and then finds the next open space which again may not be big enough.
Most other filesytems write to the first space that is big enough to fit the file, and they usually spread the files out far enough so that in case the file gets bigger it won't run into another file, and if it does it moves the file somwhere else.
With an ext3 filesystem, you won't get any fragmentation at all until the drive is about 90% full. With NTFS, all you have to do is create two files, and then make the first one slightly larger and you're already fragmented.
Aha! Found that article I was looking for:
http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/index.php/2006/08/17/why_doesn_t_linux_need_defragmenting

That may be true for ext3 (and 4 for that matter), but it is not a problem unique to NTFS at all. FAT16 and FAT32 had even bigger problems with it than NTFS has, ext2 had it, as did XFS, JFS, HFS Plus and a whole host of other file systems.

yeah. and on ssd it doesn't matter. a file can be in gazillions pieces and everywhere on the disk and yet the reading time would be the same if the file was in one piece.
there is no seek time as every part of the memory is accessible at the same speed.
defrag is just pointless and it damages the disk.