Thinkpads Forum

I'm wondering whether it's worth it to buy a 7200RPM drive now or whether I should wait for Q1-Q2 64GB or 128GB SSD. Micron announced that they will begin selling 2.5" SATA 64GB SSD's. No word on price, but I'm sure I could find something that would work for me.

So is SSD a lot faster than a 7200RPM drive?

Is the power usage that much less? What kind of battery life increase could I expect?

Is it true that there are a set number of read/write cycles? What would the life of the drive be?

I'd really look forward to no noise, no worries about spinning parts, getting rid of the Lenovo Active protection system that stops the hard drive at the slightest vibration, and no hard drive failures.

Here is a pretty good thread about performance and pricing:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=145550

SSDs are really expensive dollar-for-gigabyte. You can get a nice performance boost and reduction in noise / heat if you have that much money to spend. But 64GB is barely enough if you have a few large applications (like engineering suites) running on Vista (another hog). I think the 7K200 gives you much more bang for the buck.