The Wrap Up

Solid state drives are not going to hit one day, cause mass hysteria and have people waiting in lines outside of their local Apple Store like some products. Even at the 300 Dollar price point for a 64GB drive, enthusiasts and business users will be the first to take advantage of the new, lower prices.

Over the next few months, big box builders will start to offer solid state drives in more of their middle class notebooks, and if big memory manufacturers like Samsung are not able to meet demand, the prices will rise again. Thankfully, these manufacturers appear to be ready to meet demand or at least know they need to ramp up production quickly.

It is my belief that upgrading your platter based hard drive to an SSD will produce the most significant change to your computing experience for a modern computer. I am neither talking frames per second nor calculation from a benchmark, but your overall, real world 'I use my computer everyday' tasks. The difference is similar to running an eight year old 20GB, 512KB cache drive with Vista installed and then moving to a new SATA II drive.

Over the next 30 days, I will run my Lenovo T61 notebook with the Super Talent MasterDrive MX and give a detailed report of my experiences dealing with the battery life, losing 40GB of storage space and the overall system feel. This isn't a shelf notebook that is used on the weekend; my T61 goes with me everywhere and twelve hours on my lap a day is not uncommon.