Solid-State Drives; The End of The Bottleneck, or Just a Liability?

Would it be a problem for you if all your data suddenly disappeared?

A growing counterpoint to the hype surrounding the no-moving-parts, flash memory based data storage alternative posits that it is a very real risk. Even manufacturers admit, reading and writing to SSD harddrives is limited by the fact that their memory cells have a limit of 100k writes. Like the heat death of the universe, the failure of your shiny new solid-state drive is a creeping inevitability.

For many owners of devices using these discs (of which smartphones are an increasingly ubiquitous example), the answer may very well be "It's worth it." It typically takes, relative to accepted lifespans of devices, a long time for the weardown to occur, and with the rise of cloud computing and services like google docs and dropbox, catastrophic data loss isn't as much of a problem for people with backup routines. The advantages of SSD technology is undeniable; orders of magnitude faster data transfer, improving the overall performance of a computer with usually far more bang/buck ratio than a cpu upgrade.