I have a Sony Vaio G1, with a 32GB SSD. If I opted for the 4200rpm standard hard drive, I think that would have been the main bottleneck of the notebook. Bootup times in Vista are fairly quick, and I'm more than happy with the notebook's performance, although I'm not a power user. I get excellent battery life out of the notebook for everyday web browsing, email, and watching DVDs.

I think that fairly low ss drive sizes (32 gig in particular) can be workable. I can get away with <30 gig on my work lappy as I don't have music/photos/movies on it. Coincidentally, that's the one I schlep around the most.

PS. I've killed three 30 gig hard drives on my work lappy in the last six months.

So sign me up.

Yeah, if your work doesn't involve dealing with lots of data or the like it's quite viable.

To give you some idea, after installing Vista and Office 2007 (full version), I had about 13GB left (out of 32GB).

The real issue isn't usually the data, unless you work with video, large graphics files, big music libraries, or things like that. Typical business data in databases is tiny by the standards of any modern storage device, including those discussed in this thread. Formatted data in word processor files, spreadsheets, presentations and e-mail is bigger, but shouldn't be a problem either unless you have a heck of a lot of it. The storage concern with small drives tends to be the OS and application software, as the previous post suggests.

Precisely. Biggest database I've worked with yet was about 7 years worth of individual sales transactions and even that only came to ~750-800MB and was a veritable mountain of data.

Good timing on this thread. I have an LG A1 subnotebook and just swapped the 80GB HDD for a 32GB SSD. Smaller Sony, LG and Toshiba notebooks use 1.8" hard drives as opposed to the more standard 2.5" size. At 4200 RPM the drives are SLOW. I'm used to 7200 RPM drives (I put 'em in every notebook I buy as soon as possible) and there's definitely a significant performance delta with the smaller, slower, drives.

The SSD makes a significant difference. Writes do seem a bit slower, however read performance is SO much faster. The sluggishness complaints I had are totally gone. 32GB is very small, but it's still workable. There's just not room for the iTunes library, the huge games and a bunch of DVDrips. But I have 7gb left over and have quite a lot on it (a 7gb game, MAME and a few hundred ROMsets, Office 2k7, about 2gb worth of work files, and so on).

VS a standard notebook drive, I wouldn't recommend it. A 7200RPM drive will be faster overall. But for subnotebooks that use a 1.8" drive (Sony TR, TX, UX and TZ, Fujitsu 7230, LG A1, C1 and T1, Dell 430, and so on), the SSD is a significant improvement in performance. ZERO clue on longevity or reliability. I will find out the hard way!

The Solid State Disk (SSD) technology is fairly mature and the use of SSDs predate the availability of laptops by over a decade. I've been involved with SSDs dating back to 1975 that were then used on systems that required very high reliability & uptimes supporting ATM networks. The use of SSDs on mainframes is old; on laptops it is relatively new.

High cost per byte compared to rotating media resulted in SSDs being used generally only for the operating system functions that required low access times such as swap disks for virtual memory. SSD disks way back in 1975 had access times of 5 msecs while the traditional rotating media had access times in the 30-50 msecs access times.

True at the concept level - my first job in the computer industry was in the 1960s - but the specific circuit technologies used in today's laptop solid-state drives are very different and weren't around then. Their use in devices such as thumb drives and digital camera memory cards doesn't exercise them the same way as using them as a computer's main storage device does. While I'd personally be willing to gamble on one, the other view has some validity. The fact that solid-state disks using other technologies have been around for years doesn't, IMHO, change that.

SSD in the traditional sense--real RAM backed with a rotating disk: good.

SSD in the "chunk of flash memory in a laptop": eh?, at best.

As has been mentioned, "solid state" drives have been around forever. The difference between one that you might hang off your SAN to increase the transactional speed of a huge database versus the stuff they sell for laptops is like night and day. As is the price differential.

Unless you regularly play basketball with your notebook, I simply don't see the point as yet.

The weird thing is that I can recall Sony once upon a time saying that by 2008 or so Memorystick's would have 32 GB of capacity. As cards now regularly have up to 8GB on them it seems to me that this technology has somewhat fallen behind.

You mean I actually have more than you guys??

The file containing the heart of the plant operating instructions + some production history is a bit over 1gb. I got an unpleasant surprise when someone wanted to do some data mining on old orders not set up for it--oops, it's over 500gb and I don't have any 750gb drives around. I couldn't make a copy.