Can't we just say Dellienware? It's all one company now, so why not?

"VIPs don't have requirements"

Haha, you can try telling a VIP that as security wheels you out of the building. In corporate, a VIP gets what a VIP requires and if IT doesn't see fit to supply it to them, they will buy it out of their own budget.

VIP requirements are pretty simple: long battery life especially on business trips or in business meetings if no plugs are handy, dependability and durability to avoid local data loss (especially on business trips when they're away from the office), and speed since most VIPs "don't have time to wait". Monstrous storage is of little importance to most VIPs since their usage usually hovers in the 20GB range (for an XP based system). Their usual data includes Excel spreadsheets, Word files, a couple of big PSTs, and some decent sized PDFs. There are exceptions, especially for technical VIPs, but a 64GB drive is more than adequate for most.

Add in the benefit to IT departments who don't have to spend anywhere near the time rebuilding machines because of failed hard drives and it's a no-brainer. The VIPs will hear about the benefits of the drives, demand them, and IT will happily supply them. It's as simple as that.

It sounds like most people here don't work in a corporate environment where $920 is a drop in the bucket for VIP requirements. I have feeling Dell will sell a ton of these to corporations who see the benefits far outweight the rather negligible costs (from their billion dollar+ perspective). The good point for the consumer is that the corporations take the hit as early adopters and the residual price-drops are to be had by all.

I will outfit my laptop once Samsung and others start selling SSS for half of what Dell is offering. $900 for 64gb is just a waist of money.

I predict they will sell 3 of these. :P

For $920, why don't you just buy another Notebook to run in a RAID-esque array :P

reliability? doesn't the current tech in those solid state drives have a average limit of around 100.000 write cycles after that probability of failure will increase substancially, am i wrong or they have some new workarounds that far surpass that?

For reference, the 32GB Samsung SSDs cost about that much a year ago. And they sold more than three. Price/GB is dropping very quickly.

http://www.engadget.com/2006/05/23/samsungs-q30-ssd-with-32gb-flash...
http://www.engadget.com/2006/10/13/fujitsus-lifebook-q-and-b-laptop...

Any news on an SSD with a SATA interface? I'd love to put an 8GB one in my media PC, but I can only find PATA ones in the UK...