other than cost/GB are there any other problems that I should be aware of
with these new drives? I see that there are a lot of smaller memory
companies that are now turning these out in addition to the major
manufacturers with slightly lower costs like with flash memory...

Also... how do they stack up in performance compaired to say a WD 10k Raptor
drive? (I'm about to google this, but thought I'd ask in here as well)