Notebooks will not be the only systems to benefit from solid state drive technology, don't forget the data center

Implications: Notebook computers will not be the only systems utilizing Solid State Drives. SSD's have inherent advantages over traditional rotating HDD, well suited to the server/data center environment (e.g. lower power consumption, less heat production, no moving parts) Expect SSD's to play a prominent role in servers (blades, etc) as NAND prices continue to erode YoY.

Analysis: The data center environment is similar to an ecosystem. You have temperature requirements, humidity limits, power usage considerations and many other factors that play a role in server health. Of course, heat generation and power consumption are two of the key factors in a dense server populated environment that need to be considered. SSD's fill a perfect niche for server farms by reducing this heat production and also reducing per server power consumption. Some manufacturers of streaming video servers (e,g, video on demand) and avionics entertainment sytems currently use this technology for flash-based content storage and have been for years.

IBM is already offering a Sandisk 32GB SSD as an option on certain blade servers. As prices come down on NAND, these will become more and more attractive to the IT buyers of the world.

The article also brings up an interesting topic of adding SSD's to television sets to perform a Tivo-like function. It will be interesting to see if the TV OEM's can successfully integrate a solid state drive into a television without adding external hardware.