I'm guessing that at least right now the average computer user here at TRO doesn't have to worry about this. But for those users who like to play around with their computer and are not afraid to replace parts in their computer they might want to pay attention to this.
There is now on the market something called "Solid State Drives" (SSD) which in a couple of years will probably replace the typical "hard drive" (HDD). The advantage is that they are extremely fast. A computer with one of these will seem almost lightning speed. However, they are still a little pricey. For instance a 30gb SSD will cost you around $85.00. These drives will sit in same slot as the older HDD drives and behave the same way.
However, there is a bigger concern other their price. That is they can not be securely erased. Current methods of securely wiping data on HDDs are not very affective on the new drives leaving old (even deleted) data easy to retrieve. Here is an article that explains it more in detail
The security limitations of solid-state drives If you do decide to install a SSD to speed up your computer my advice would be to use it as your boot drive and make sure you don't store sensitive data on it.
