I wrote a while back about a dream laptop that included a solid state drive. These things are compelling because they are damn fast, and use a lot less power than a disk drive. As a developer working with databases and NetBeans (which is very I/O intensive with all the class indexing and module loading it does), a fast disk means a fast life.
So I dream about getting a solid state drive - it's just they're so expensive - $650 for 32GB - ouch. But when the prices start going down -- I'm there!
The other area where this could kick the pants off of things is in the server room. Dominic Strippoli does the numbers on a RAID array of solid state drives. This setup ain't cheap, but with the right controller installed (the standard one just couldn't keep up), he was able to get 800 MB/second sustained read with .1ms access times. Using these drives, he got Windows Vista to boot up in five seconds!
Imagine running your database on an array of these things. Yowza! I hope Sun storage is keeping an eye on this trend...
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