The Solid State Revolution

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BlackBerry Bold: $299 | photograph by Tom Schierlitz

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IBM BladeCenter HS21 XM: Starting at $2,149, but price varies radically by configuration | photograph by Tom Schierlitz

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The new energy-sipping SSD technology has "green" benefits, of course, which are catnip for marketers. But there is a more basic and immediate advantage to an SSD-driven machine: Many large companies can no longer expand their data centers because they literally can't get any more electricity. "A CIO's worst nightmare," Desens says, "is having to go tell the CEO of his company that he can't put in any more data-storage capacity because he's out of power. It's happening everywhere. Airline reservation systems, online retailers, you name it."

Larry Kasanoff, the executive producer of the film True Lies and now the CEO of the animation studio Threshold Entertainment, had that very nightmare last summer. Kasanoff estimates that each frame in his upcoming movie, Foodfight!, uses 15 megabytes of hard-drive space; that's 7.5 terabytes (or roughly 7,900,000 megabytes) of storage to hold the finished project. But producing an animated movie isn't just about storing thousands of pictures, it's about manipulating them, ideally in real time, which means he also needed many more, or much faster, processors to edit it. "You can see [the effect of slow processors] in crowd scenes," he says, "it just isn't smooth or natural -- it looks like a hundred guys who just took strychnine."

Kasanoff had no choice but to switch over to a faster, more efficient system: "We already take the maximum power that's possible off the grid here in Santa Monica," he said. "We couldn't get any more from the city. We either had to expand by increasing server efficiency, or move the company." Now consumers will be able to upgrade their own laptops in the same way: Many SSD manufacturers are selling 2.5-inch drives that can be simply swapped for their old spinning model.

One of solid-state memory's biggest advantages is its nearly magical ability to hold digital information in extreme conditions, even when the memory chip is frozen, cooked, dropped, stepped on, and/or suddenly yanked from its power source. American SSD manufacturer Super Talent Technology, which has annual sales of about $200 million, claims its SSD drives can withstand 1,500 g-forces, operate in a temperature range between 32 degrees and 172 degrees, run for more than a million hours, and go without power for up to 10 years without losing memory.

This sort of extreme performance, set against the plunging, inverse relationship between power and size, has recently created a design Big Bang. Engineers are running wild. That's progress.

But if there's a lament for the passing of moving parts, it's that they are like us. They spin, they hum, they flutter, and then they break. They hint at the fate we all share -- someday that timing belt will snap, throwing your engine into a confused and fatal arrhythmia. A mechanic will look under the hood. The bad news: Your engine will be dead. The good news: He'll know why. Going solid state means trading in that understanding for the chance to live forever. Apparently, that's a trade most of us are happy to make.

Paul Hochman is the gear and tech editor for Today on NBC and host of MSN.com's GearDaddy.