this review seems pretty damning if you ask me:

"Cons: This drives raw transfer speeds are lower than that of a $50 80GB IDE longitudinal recording drive (typical 7200RPM drive) by a whopping 25%. This is unacceptable at the cost of this drive. You could buy 5 15K SCSI drives and a great 256MB RAID controller and it would be WAY faster, safer, and STILL way cheaper. In addition why spend so much on such a slow drive when the Samsung SSD: 100 MB/sec Write, 120 MB/sec Read is out.
Other Thoughts: Inherent in the SSD technology is the lost of data recovery methods (currently) there is no magnetic ghost data to recover from with a magnetic microscope in case of electrical drive failure. Hence RAID is still needed. "

the other reviewer seemed to disagree with this reviewer's claims. check out the review on my latest dot.

this one is just a particularly slow ssd by a generic manufacturer. the negative review is perfectly accurate. but you cant fit what hes talking about in a laptop less than an inch thick. or even less than like four inches thick. and the samsung is obviously going to be a faster drive, but its nowhere near as large. the main problem i see is that the drives are still going to fail from too many write caches, even if you can toss them around and bang them up. the life isnt going to be that longer, and possibly even shorter, than if you just were careful with a regular drive. only real appeal is for ipatient businessmen getting off of airplanes, photographers who need a subnotebook running fast photoshop, uhh other people like that.

why would too many write caches be a cause of their failure? also, it seems that the review from that mac site indicated that SSD drives improved computer performance in just about every respect. that doesn't appear to be too profession specific, does it?

because the total number of writes is limited. they also have no recoverability. but otherwise yeah theyre good. i mean if you like spending thousands of dollars on a computer to surf the net and word process on. seems kinda silly to me.

what do you mean by "the total number of writes is limited"? as in, the total number of writes at one time or over the lifespan of the drive. btw, i totally think they're way too expensive to be worth anything at this point. but if i could, say, steal one, or have some retail store "gift" it to me, i think it might be a very good thing.

over the lifespan of the drive. but also the write speed (as opposed to read) are slower than for hdds.

why is that?

ahh.. i started typing a long explanation.. but its my own speculative bullshitting.. not exactly my field, you know? so heres my attempt to humor you, with no research done. but id still say it is 'somewhere close to right'™...

basically, when you are writing to a sold state drive, its like ram (random access memory) except non-volatile (power off doesnt wipe it clean). 'solid state' means we are talking about integrated circuits made with semiconductors (wafers or silicon and other materials that are blasted with protons to make 'holes' that can then push around electrons to variously transmit and block a charge like a switch, but without any moving parts). the issue is that, if you do this hundreds of thousands of times, the materials stop being able to make the switch happen. you get write errors. the threshold for when this starts to occur is constantly being improved upon, so the ssds coming out in a few years might not have this problem to the same extent they do now.
the other problem is random write speed. hdds are pretty good at writing, since they are just making magentic stripes on a disk. solid state is a lot more tricky to write data and ensure it stays there after you reboot the system. i dont know all the specifics, but in real world tests, ssd still lags for things like large file transfers (drag a 2gig divx file onto a ssd and itll be slower than transferring to the hdd).
i dunno. solid state is coming, but itll be a while before we get free from hard disks. that revolution might have to come from nanotech. but when it comes (20 years?) its gonna be woah. but then again, 20 years is gonna have too much woah for woah.

it's so flattering --being humored and all. maybe i'll just look into it on my own. i thought they worked a bit differently, but thanks nonetheless. nanotech better get here sooner than 20--20 years is shit. i want my fucking cyborgian prehensile tail and brachiating-enabled monkey arms NOW.

theres always 'nano-board'™. looks a lot like cardboard, but nano-infused with all the benefits of.. humor?