Had replaced the drive on the 8500A with an SSD. It's been working very well. I had bought two different ones to try. One SATA one PATA. The SATA with adapter went in the 8500A, the PATA is going into this system. Different brand, we will see.
Just be careful with SSDs in that scope, as they tend to suffer from file system corruption (I tried several ones, including the Transcend PATA SSD on your picture), and all suffered from the same problem.
The reason seems to be that the SSDs only really support UDMA modes, which for PATA requires a 80 conductor cable to work reliably. The scope however uses a 44pin cable (there are no 84 conductor cables, at least I'm not aware of them) which is not really suited for UDMA66 or faster modes. Another forum user (Tunersandwich) who has the same scope made the same experience, he also tried a SSHD but that was a no-go either.
In the end I went back to spinning rust, i.e. a modern fast SATA laptop drive connected through a cheap SATA-PATA bridge. Works fine and absolutely reliable.
$7350 for the Rigol DS6064 or $9660 for the DS6104. I assume this is the market LeCroy is going after.
Not really. The WaveRunner Series starts quite a bit above that.
The WaveSurfer 3000 is the one that competes with the Rigol DS6000 scopes, although no-one really buys them anyways due to their poor value for money.