Solid State Drives (SSDs) have been on the market a while now and are still too expensive for the majority of users to add to their computers. SSDs are commonly offered as options on notebook computers like the recently leaked Lenovo X300 notebook. What you don’t commonly see are SSD drives offered on desktop systems.

HP recently announced a system offering just that, an SSD hard drive in a slim desktop PC system. The benefits of a SSD in a notebook are very apparent with reduced energy consumption and better shock tolerance thanks to no moving parts. The benefits in a desktop system may not be as apparent to some.

The slight difference in boot speed might be a factor for impatient PC users, but the real benefit for SSD in a desktop is in the power savings. According to HP, the Go Green PC Power Play Study found that the U.S. government could save over $82.4 million USD in energy costs in one year by updating to Energy Star 4.0 compliant devices.

Large corporations that are rolling out hundreds of computers at one time could see some very significant energy savings by using desktop computers with SSD drives. The individual buying one PC for his small business won’t really see that big of a benefit form a SSD equipped desktop.

The HP Compaq dc7800 Ultra-slim desktop comes stock with an 80GB HDD. The optional SSD drive has a capacity of only 16GB, so power users will have another reason to not upgrade to the SSD which reportedly adds around $300 to the price of the computer.

The starting price for the system equipped with the SSD is $1258 and is shipping now. Base models with standard hard drives start at $729. Processors range from a Pentium Dual-core 2 GHz to a Core 2 Duo 2.33 GHz.

With SSD drives available with up to 832GB right now, HP obviously chose the paltry 16GB SSD for this system as a cost saving measure.