This is the best article I've seen yet about SSDs (flash memory-based Solid-state drives):

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=1

The article is long - 31 pages - but well written, well worth reading in its entirety.

Why is it important? Mass storage speed is the main bottleneck in modern PCs. Over the last 20 years or so, processor and memory speeds have increased by a factor of over 100, but hard drives have improved by barely a factor of 10.

VFP and other databases can create heavy loads of small writes, which is one of the worst-case scenarios for mass storage performance. The effect of this can be masked/mitigated by enabling write-behind caching on hard drives (aka "lazy writes"). However, some people turn this feature off for real or perceived data safety (in the event of power loss) or reliability issues.

The article shows that with good SSDs you can expect approximately a 10x performance improvement in the most demanding benchmarks, even measured against the best conventional hard drives such as the WD VelociRaptor. This is a true breakthrough, and will greatly benefit any computer operations that are mass-storage I/O bound. The real-world effect will be even greater for those users who have disabled write-behind caching.

While still expensive in terms of $ per GB storage, prices are steadily dropping. The future is SSD.