Well, according to Samsung they are. Samsung, along with PQI, are strong advocates of Solid-state drives (SSD), and took the time to talk to DailyTech about the advantages of SSDs. Personally, as you may know, Tech-Rant has been covering SSDs in some detail; as I feel the implementation of these drives in to the mainstream computer will be a turning point in the average system's performance, similar to that of dual core processors.

Even though the performance benefits of SSDs are substantial; the decreased power consumption of these drives is being touted as their major feature by Samsung. A NAND SSD would use less than 200 milliwatts during read/writes, and 0 watts when idle, comparatively the average hard drive uses 9 watts. This difference in power consuption would be highly beneficial to the notebook user as the hard drive accounts for 10 per cent of the total power draw. After all, an extra 10 per cent of battery life is not something to be snuffed at.

The main setback to SSDs is the limited amount of writes one can make before the drive 'burns out' and parts become unusable. For your typical flash based drive this equates to around 10,000 writes to each group of cells and Samsung use a technique known as 'wear leveling' to evenly distribute writes acorss groups of cells. 10,000 Writes should be enough for all users according to DailyTech who point out:

Consider a typical computer that writes 120 megabytes per hour to the hard drive. On a 32GB solid-state NAND drive, wear leveling would distribute this data over the entire drive -- it would take 267 hours to fill the device once. Even on a multi-cell flash device, at this rate it would take no less than 150 years to burnout all the bits on the SSD. Single-cell drives are capable of ten times as many writes.

Now the only other problem with these drives is cost. A 2GB SD memory card costs around £25/$40 and the costs of flash memory will need to drop when you consider a 250GB Hard Drive costs about twice this. I can see Hybrid Drives, or even two drives being used as the standard in 2008, unless prices take a huge dive. When you think a Windows install needs around 2GB and another 2GB for the swap file a 4GB flash unit would cover this quite adequately and provide a nice boost in the operating systems responsiveness.

Although, I am looking forward to when SSDs can be cheaply purchased around the 32GB mark. With 32GB one can install Windows, have room for a swap file, install 3/4 large games at 4GB each, an office suite, and some anti-virus software all on a SSD. Leaving all the users large media files stored on a separate Hard Drive.