We've been testing a few laptops from Dell (Latitude D430) with the SSD hard drives. The general performance has been pretty good, though the max size of 32Gb and extra $500 cost make them somewhat cost-prohibitive.

Another thing we noticed was that the write performance on the drives is rather slow for Outlook in cached mode. The issue appears to be that instead of being abe to write in reasonably small block of data like a computer can to a normal spinning drive, it has to write larger blocks of data. So there is a read + change + write action that has to happen, not just a write.

Overall, they're good and fast for a lot of things, but Outlook in cached mode is pretty crappy. We've actually had Dell confirm the performance "issue" and one client looking at exchanging a few dozen drives for the normal ones.

They are generally faster than 4200 RPM drives, but if you can get a 5400 or 7200 RPM drive in your laptop those are likely to perform better.

Another advantge of the SSD is lower power consumption, which equates to longer battery life.