Solid state hard drives - Any good?

For laptop computer

[kapow]

Some laptops are offering a solid hard drive now i.e. a hard drive that uses chips instead of a disc. I like the sound of this, has anyone tried one? Any experience?

Is battery usage reduced?
My main concern is battery time. The ads about solid state hard drives rave about speed, but do not mention any increase of battery time (i.e. less power required). I assume if there is no spinning disk the drive will require less power - resulting more hours usage per battery charge. Does anyone know if this is correct?

Speed
They are meant to be faster. Any experience?

Reliability
This is the big issue. Some of the notes about solid state hard drives say they can have errors. As far as I can see it looks like every few years. I could live with this as I could restore from ghost once a year :)
But is it true?

Cost: Extra £300 - £400 on the price of the laptop.

Capacity: Dell approx 30GB (which is fine for me).

[kaled]

[dell.com...]

The new drives can also increase system performance by up to 23 percent and decreases boot time by up to 34 percent compared to traditional HDDs available with the Latitude D420 and D620 ATG6

From memory, I think laptop drives usually draw less than 5 watts so it's not a huge power saving compared with the screen.

It's also worth noting that XP and Vista offer native file compression - if you work with video or other compressed files it's worthless but if you work with mostly text and programs then it might give you the equivalent of a few more GB. Obviously, XP would be the Windows version of choice since it is much smaller but Vista would fit OK.

Kaled.

[kaled]

You should also consider swap files - this can be a flash killer. I don't think you can switch off virtual memory entirely but you can set it to 2 MB. You would want at least 2 GB of RAM, maybe more.

Kaled.

[kapow]

Thanks kaled. Have you tried one?

[kaled]

No, nor do I know anyone who has. I have always operated a policy of staying at least about 18 months behind cutting edge technology. However, depending on the intended use, I think the technology is sufficiently established to be considered.

I would definitely recommend an external backup solution if critical data is to be stored on it, but if that data would fit on a cheap USB stick or a CD/DVD disk (double-layer, that's over 8GB) then that's no problem at all.

Kaled.