Has anyone thought about running solid state drives for a server?

I understand the slow write times of the SSDs right now, and also the shorter lifetime of such devices compared to the traditional hard disk, but the enery savings would be quite profound.

Sure, you can get a fair amount of decent ones for a low cost, the write speeds aren't the greatest, but the read speeds more than make up for it. If it's not something that is critical you shouldn't have any issues. However, be aware that a lot of the drives out on the market today display some sort of issues, be it incompatibility with certain motherboards/chipsets. Just make sure you have a good backup!

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It is possible to do some very funky stuff with SSD's; I'm not at the stage of deploying any yet in server environments though.

This is a good vid from Samsung though: YouTube - Samsung SSD Awesomeness

Oh wow, 24 SSDs in a RAID! That machine flew!

They hardware must cost a fortune though. I did look at hardware RAID controllers a couple of months back, but the prices were still way out of my budget.