I disagree about the long-term reliability of SSDs. Intel's X25-M has a 5 year warranty. They claim that writing 100GB/day for 5 years will not cause it to fail. If we compare the technologies in terms of reliability, flash has three things going for it:<p>1. Flash degrades predictably over time. Manufacturers know the average number of write cycles a cell can sustain and design SSDs with "spare" flash and wear leveling. They can engineer the expected lifetime of the drive. Hard drives usually fail spontaneously.<p>2. The most common failure mode for flash cells is to fail on write. Even if a cell gets "stuck," the data can still be read. Hard drives fail on read or write, and in most cases all data on the drive is lost.<p>3. A 3.5" 7200RPM drive's platters spin at 70mph on the outside edge. The head gap is measured in millionths of an inch, making them very susceptible to vibration and shock. Since SSDs have no moving parts, they're practically immune.<p>There are really only two disadvantages of SSDs: cost and capacity.