Solid State Hard Drives

they are essentially like large flash drives, or many put together

there are no moving parts, they are silent, they are faster

however they are so much more expensive then regular hard drives so i would say unless you need a very small amount of storage space (doubtful), it wouldn't be worth it to get a computer with one.  And even thought i say it is faster then a hard drive, it is not all that much faster, it is fast in the way that the hard drive head has to move to where you want to write data, and that does not happen in a solid state drive

so untill the price comes down alot in the future, i wouldnt get it

one thing that is better about solid state drives is that because of the fact they have no moving parts, they do better under movement and shock, like if you dropped a regular ipod from high up it would most likely break the hard drive, but if it was a mini ( flash memory) it would be fine.  They can endure much more then hard drives can

For random access they are faster than normal hard drives.

For sequential reading, they are slower.