SSD is commonly referred to as flash drives. Unlike a traditional hard disk drive (HDD), the SSD has no moving parts, motors nor series of heads. The SSD is housed with a RAM (memory bus board), battery card and CPU controllers. It is seen as a data storage device that uses non-volatile memory such as flash or volatile memory such as SDRAM to store data, instead of the spinning platters found in conventional HDDs (hard disk drives).
The SSD uses CPU controllers to manage data flow from each bank of RAM passing information to the attached drive controller which in turn passes it to the host system. Further, the SSD is protected with high resilience of physical vibration, shock and extreme temperature fluctuations.   

The concerns raised about SSDs has been the issue of power consumption and heat dissipation that it may pose. It is found that SSDs consumes less power, and less heat dissipation taking place as there is no rotating motor movement within.  This makes a good case for its application in handhelds, smartcard apps, and data centres, thus   rendering cost savings, in terms of additional coolers, internal power supply, or any add-on battery.   

The flip side of SSD is that it is costly in terms of cost per GB (see table) when compared to traditional HDD. However, for quick data storage access, SSD is the preferred solution.

Future trends
Most of industry watchers are skeptical about SSD making a market impact. Going by trends, although traditional HDD prices are sliding and HDD vendors penetration is strong enough, it may take quite a while for SSDs to replace the legacy HDD.

For now, we may see emerging hybrid storage architecture which likely may a combination of SSD and HDD in the same storage stack with frequently accessed data directed to the SSD stack giving the edge of quick access.  
With growing data applications, storage is cross-pollinating across small to big devices. It is more likely that the early adopters of SSD would come from smaller devices like handhelds, extending to laptops. Although, the cost of SSD is high for now, it’s gaining wider acceptance among vendors is and this may begin to eat into the conventional HDD market share.