I'm not sure how £180 can be considered 'good value for money' when it's up against (larger!) hard drives costing £30 a piece. SSD can't compete in the value range because the technology is prohibitively expensive - even to try out experimentally would just be a waste of money at the moment.

From what I've seen on benchmarks the claimed speed boost just isn't there in real world use - the lack of seek time is offset by the slower read (and *much* slower write) times.

Tony, if you do a straight comparison of performance between SSD and HDD you may well find the cost prohibitive. If you do swap the OS/apps drive on your PC for an SSD I am convinced you will be impressed by the result. Forget extra RAM - this is the business.

For laptops you also have to add in the peace of mind of having an indestructible drive.

is 14GB for OpSys, Pagefile, Hiberfile and programs on my laptop. The rest of my 40GB HD is for a bit of headroom, working data and a few movie/music/picture files. Any important data is stored on an external drive.

What I'd like to see is a 32GB SSD drive made up from two lots of 16GB tied together with a simple RAID-0 internal controller - that baby would fly. Add an e-sata port and I can plug in a big fast external hard drive at home; I'm happy to use my 16GB USB stick for working away from home.

When will anybody make this for me?

I'd love to get one of these SSD drives into my laptop, and I'd be willing to pay for it. However, I've only one one drive bay and I don't want to be messing around with external USB disks. So I need someone to create some kind of 64GB SSD, 250GB HDD hybrid drive. Optimistic? You betcha.

Isn't the random access time more of a plus than the article makes it out to be? Especially if the drive is used for the OS and applications as suggested.