[Z-man]

I know this is a little late to the thread, but here's my $0.42:

One thing not mentioned there -- the SSD "disks" have a rather limited write-life. After so many writes, that spot on the SSD will no longer accept writes. Reads also effect the life of the SSD, but not as much. Granted, conventional hard drives also have fail-rates, but IIRC, they have more writes than SSD.

The only advantages I see for SSD are:
1. Speed. If you are a regular MAC user, you won't see a huge difference. If you are doing a database lookup on a 1,000,000 line tablespace, then you may see an advantage with SSD.
2. Power costs - again, on a laptop, you won't notice a major difference. But in an enterprise application (think IBM DS8700, EMC V-Max Storage arrays), you will see a reduction in power and cooling.
3. Extreme conditions - in my realm of datacenter storage, this isn't really an issue, since the modern datacenter has proper cooling and (hopefully) no altitude changes. But unless you are planning on climbing Mt. Rainier and Half Dome with your lap-top in tow, this isn't really an issue for you either!

I work in SAN Storage (I managed ~200TB of SAN storage). At this point, I don't see a need for SSD in our company. (Then again, I've got other performance enhancing appliances -- IBM SVC). SSD is just too expensive to implement on the large scale that I would need it for. For a laptop --it is more cost effective to have regular backups to external hard drive and DVD than to replace your hard drive is SSD technology.

-Z-man.