2009 saw the NetBook become big (in an economic way.) Web 2.0 is bigger than ever and is evolving into Web 3.0 (I'll do a post about this later.)  Even better, SSD hard drives became more prevalent.

SSD stands for "Solid State Drive" and can be amazingly fast. I put an SSD into a laptop and its restart time went from more than 10 minutes to less 2 minutes.  It started challenging my desktop machines.  In fact, only one desktop I used at that time could beat it's speed -- that desktop machine was running with iSCSI 15K rpm RAID 10 drives (Geek-speak translated: FAST!)

My advice:  Don't get just any SSD as the performance is all over the place, and I hate to say this but reliability is also unpredictable.  Unfortunately, I know this from personal experience.  I lost my laptop because, I suspect, the SSD fried the motherboard's hard-drive controller and the SSD simultaneously.

Getting back on track, SSD's will be more available, cheaper, and will perform better and better.  By the end of 2010, I predict we will see most machines equipped with the option of an SSD hard-drive and they will be 500G or larger.  By the end of 2012, you may no longer see hard-drives that spin.

Happy New Year!