Ummm...actually they are. I already have quite serviceable 1TB and 2TB hard drives. Replacement 1TB SSDs seem to run about five to seven times the cost of similar hard drives, so in my system I can keep what I have for $0, or upgrade to SSD's for about $2,000 worth of 1TB SSDs to keep the same capacity.

The only time I do work that requires any hard drive (or SSD) speed is booting up and doing backups. My bootup is SSD, and now that you've convinced me to go to CrashPlan, backups run quietly in background all the time with no noticeable cost to performance in foreground operations.

If I were building a new computer I would certainly keep the SSD for system drive, maybe an SSD for main data drive, but certainly not for all the backups.

And, I am not all that convinced about the reliability of SSDs. Perhaps their failure rate is lower than a HDD, but HDDs usually give plenty of warning before they quit working, while SSDs are known to fail totally with no warning at all.

I know, I am a Luddite at heart, but I think I'll hang onto my mechanical drives a little longer.

tanstaafl.