I was reading Solid-State Disk: Soul of The New Machines, where Robert Mitchell talks about solid state disks and their move into the laptop arena.

There are some obvious benefits -- better performance and longer battery life, for example. The lower power requirements and almost instantaneous 'on' speed mean that it makes a huge difference to the way you use your laptop.

The use of solid state memory for storage is increasing -- the MP3 player market was where it started and exploded, followed by the extended use in digital cameras and USB thumb drives.  The size is shrinking and the capacity increasing --something nailed home for me this weekend when I bought a 1GB Memory Stick Micro (M2) card. It's smaller than my thumbnail, and almost a quarter of the size of the 1GB Memory Stick Pro I bought just last year my digital camera.