Samsung has announced a new 256Gb solid state drive. Production will begin later this year. The initial market is for notebooks, but the real market is for databases.
SSD drives are faster than hard disks, more reliable, and have different access method performance patterns. Hard drives perform best while sequentially accesses large blocks of data. SSDs are equally capable of accessing random data or sequential data.
This change is as significant as the change from paper tape to mag tape, or mag tape to hard drives. Database vendors that grok this evolutionary step and rewrite their storage engine to optimize for SSD drives will survive. Those that don't will go the way of WordPerfect for Windows (WordPerfect once owned 99% of the word processing market. WordPerfect didn't move to Windows very gracefully, and as a result, many PC users don't even remember WordPerfect.)