A small note about SSD's: SSD's do in fact run faster..... A LOT faster, but obviously at a few costs:
1. Space: Yes, SSD's have come and are coming a long way to higher capacity, but they're still fairly small in comparison to what's available. However, if you just have another mechanical HDD or external storage unit for all your large files and media, then this might not be a huge issue.
2. The issue of wear on a SSD: Solid State Drives operate on Flash Memory in large capacities. The way information is stored and pulled on a SSD makes it so that if 80% of your SSD is filled, it will use the last 20% a lot more often than the other 80%. Information will be going in and out, being written and deleted in the form of temp files, stuff you may download and delete often, etc, more often in the space you're not using, and it's always used as "what space is available first to write and read off of" vs "what space is used the least often". There's discussions going around on how SSD's would operate at, say, 90%+ capacity over periods of time vs SSD's at 50% capacity doing the same thing. Theoretically, they're predicting that a SSD that's less than 50% capacity would last much longer over extended periods of read/write/delete. However, this is easily countered as such that even with the reduced lifespan, they're still MUCH longer lasting than a mechanical hard drive.
3. Cost: They're very costly in Dollar/Gigabyte ratio.
4. Fast Development: So this is a good/bad here. It's being developed so fast that prices are starting to drop quick as capacity and development progress. However, having the "latest and greatest" is difficult here because as soon as you buy it, guaranteed within about 6 months a new SSD will come out in double the size. This was a problem in the early stages (we're talkin 32 to 64 gb stage here), but now that we're at 256 gb, this still allows you to have all your majorly accessed applications and your O/S on it w/out having to worry about running out of space. Read/Write times on newly developed SSD's has definitely increased, but not by TOO much so it's not too bad in that arena either.
Now, for some BENEFITS!! This is the good part:
1. SPEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED. It's about 10x faster than a regular hard drive and about 6x faster than a Velociraptor could ever be.
2. Low heat
3. No noise
4. Durable as hell, they're just a bunch of huge flash memory chips on a board so they can withstand shock easily. Great for laptops and desktops alike
5. Compatible with SATA interface, no need to worry there
6. Never have to defragment, ever.
7. No moving parts, chances of a failure are very slim to almost none. Lifetime is much greater than a mechanical hdd.