Interesting news - Alienware is to add 64GB solid-state drives to its Alienware Area-51 ALX and Aurora ALX desktop computers.
"Hybrid we consider to be a Band-Aid approach to solid state," said Diana [Marc Diana, Alienware product marketing manager]. "Solid state pretty much puts hybrid in an obsolete class right now."
I agree with Diana, hybrid drives are a dead stick and have become obsolete before their time even came. If you want to live on the bleeding edge, go for solid-state drives, if you're not feeling adventurous, go with traditional disk-based drives.
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My only concern is reliability. Given that current hard drives have a lifespan of about 3 - 5 years, solid-state drives don't have a lot of competition when it comes to lifespan, but that's no reason to be foolhardy with your data. One technology that makes solid-state possible is wear leveling which makes sure that writes are spread across then entire free space so one area of the memory isn't hammered more than others. However, how well wear leveling works depends on how much free space you've got on the drive. If you load up the drive with 50GB of fixed data (OS, apps, games and so on), the remaining 14GB is going to get hammered a lot more than it would if you had 60GB of free space, especially if you use the drive for temp files and hibernation data. Maybe you already need two solid-state drives?
The upsides of solid-state drives is performance, but if you have concerns about reliability, it's probably better to stick with traditional hard drives for now.
