Another huge benefit besides faster access time, greater longevity, vastly superior shock resistance, less power consumption, less heat and less noise is the fact that SSD’s also don’t need to be defragmented.

Traditional spinning HD’s are about to go the way of the floppy drive and the Zip drive. They will be a legacy device within 2 years (2013) at which point OEM manufacturers like Dell will not even offer them as an option.

As you know the transistor was invented in the ’50’s and was different from the preceding valves (‘tubes’ in the US) in that electron movement took place in a solid – germanium, later silicon – rather than a gas or a vacuum. This is what gave rise to term ‘solid state’. Many early transistor consumer electronic products were sold badged as ‘SOLID STATE’. This means that RAM is also solid state memory. The previous ‘gaseous state memory’ was the valve triode. This is a reference to valve and transistor flip-flops which are among the basics of electronic memory.