rpm in hard drives related to laptops

The read/write time for any hard drive will not be limited by the speed of the hard drive. You can put any rpm hard drive in your notebook.

You would want to find the fastest RPM possible for your notebook. It does make a difference in performance. People don't go SSD for nothing you know? (too expensive for me though)

cheers ...

well they are the same from the point of view that they are storage devices,

SSD drives differ in that they use solid state memory where hard drives use magnetic disk platters.

SSD drives are much faster, use less power, and can usually survive a drop.

The also cost $$$ compared to regular drives

As Dave said, they both store data and can be accessed via SATA connections, but the similarity ends there.

Solid State Drives (SSDs) actually have much more in common with RAM than with hard disk drives.

Hard Disk Drives are mechanical components that work rather like record players. The disks spin and a magnetic head adjusts to read or write to different sectors on the disc surface.

SSDs, on the other hand, electronically access and modify NAND flash memory chips attached to a Printed Circuit Board (PCB) via a specialized microprocessor called a controller. SSDs are more complex as a result of all this advanced technology, typically have a lower life expectancy than hard drives (although this varies in proportion to the type and amount of NAND flash memory they contain and the wear-leveling algorithms used by the controller), and cost significantly more, but they are also able to operate in extreme conditions in which hard drives would fail, can take much more abuse in general operating conditions without failing, typically consume slightly less power than hard drives, and can maintain much faster transfer and access times.

The durability and speed of SSDs along with falling prices based on the ability to make higher capacity flash chips for less money when using smaller gate technology (shrinking from 50nm down to 40, 30, or 20nm and smaller) is what is leading the increase in adoption of SSDs and the decrease in hard drive use, although widespread general use of SSDs will likely not happen for 2-3 more years.

Too much! It always comes out at 3-4 times more cost and less storage than a normal fast drive for me.

cheers ...

They're not too bad. I have three of them. Two in laptops and one as my boot drive in my Desktop.

OCZ makes the best SSDs IMO.

Yep. And the just came out with some 1.8" models

cheers ...

I picked up my 256 GB SSD drive for $ 500.00 (Samsung)

I am having hard time justifying this investment in hard drives

cheers ...

nah. Boot up in less than 30 seconds

Worth it to me

There you have it. I have plenty of time to wait.

cheers ...

A standard hard drive will likely last 5-10 years before encountering a major mechanical problem which makes it inoperable. SSDs do not have these mechanical problems but instead they have write endurance problems. Each NAND flash chip can only be written to a fixed number of times (somewhere between 300 and 100,000 times depending on all the variables I mentioned earlier) and once that limit is reached, the chip is useless. At an industry standard drive write usage of 50GB per day and assuming daily use, SSDs under 200GB capacity and using Multi-Layer Cell (MLC) flash memory are likely to reach that limit in under 5 years. Larger capacity SSDs will last longer, and enterprise-class SSDs with Single Layer Cell (SLC) flash memory last the longest, up to 5 or more times longer than enterprise hard drives.

However, MLC SSDs are currently around 10x the price per gigabyte (GB) as hard drives and SLC SSDs are 40-50x the price per GB of hard drives, so many people do not yet believe that SSDs are worth it since they're so expensive. In the coming years, SSD manufacturers plan to use ever smaller fabrication processes, thus enabling them to eventually sell SSDs at greatly reduced prices compared to their prices today.

Personally, I will consider an SSD worth it when the price per GB compared to hard drives is equal or less than the performance increase gained in transfer and access speed.

Less speedy rpmed hard drives tend to last forever in my experience. Even my fast one lasted for 5 years.

SSDs arene't truly worth it, just get more ram for 'instant' storage persay.
I always think of it as just keeping my data there, so speed of the hd, truly...isn't a huge deal. especially when it comes to the limitations of ssds, which price alone still outweighs it for me.

I'd agree that they aren't worth it now, but when they cost closer to $1/GB (which should start to happen near the end of this year) and run at closer to 500 MB/s R/W (which should start sometime next year), I'd consider them worth it. The extra performance will then be enough to justify the extra price, in my opinion.