Yesterday Western Digital announced a fairly cool 1TB 2.5-inch HDD and created a whole new problem for those who want to upgrade their laptops.

Western Digital's Scorpio Blue 1-terabyte model, are huge and relatively cheap for the first time. Now it is possible to buy a drive for $250 with more space than most consumer laptop users will ever need. Other stuff in WD's range, like the 750GB Scorpio Blue, which sells for a very reasonable $190. So with prices like these has the day of the SSD arrived where the old hard drive is dead and buried? Obviously not.

For ages pundits have been saying that SSDs will be the future. They are silent, use less energy and have faster seek and read times. For a long time they were very expensive and this had been the hurdle that many analysts thought would be difficult to cross. Microsoft recently announced it has fine-tuned Windows 7 to run faster on SSDs, although its technology only works with the new SSDs.

It is also clear that despite SSD's advantages the price difference is still too noticeable for mainstream, consumer use. Intel recently touted the affordability of its new series of X25-M SSDs. Yet its 160GB model costs $440 which is almost twice as much as the 1TB WD HDD. What's more, we're talking about 2.5-inch laptop drives here. The price difference compared to 3.5-inch dekstop drives is mind boggling, as you can get a 1TB HDD for just over $50. Basically you pay slightly over 5 cents per gigabyte, while the same amount of SSD storage will cost you more than $1.5.

At the moment other drive makers seem happy with such high prices, and there's not much they can do about it. So, it might be a year or two before SSD drives start to make the dramatic fall in price that will force conventional hard drives out to pasture.