solid state drive. They can have much faster read/write times (at least higher quality ones) than conventional drives. They also cost a whole lot more per gigabyte.
Games are only getting bigger. An affordable SSD needs to come out at 500 GB right now before I could really consider it more than an expensive novelty. Otherwise, cutting down the once-a-day loading time of an OS from about 20 to 30 seconds to 5 or 10 really doesn't warrant it.
Uh, what. Games aren't the only thing you do with a computer. Booting Windows isn't the only time the hard drive comes into play. Whenever an application needs to hit up the disk, that takes 20 ms on a platter drive, versus 0.1 ms on an SSD. That's 200 times faster. And it shows: pretty much everything is faster and more responsive with an SSD.
The hard drive is the slowest component in any computer. Even a low-end PC benefits from improved hard drive performance. If you're planning to use this computer for literally anything other than games ever, an SSD is totally worth the money. If you can find $200 in the budget, absolutely get an SSD. It won't affect your frame rates in Crysis, but it affects just about everything else.
"Abloo bloo it's too small, platters have more space"
So get both? I have a 180GB SSD and it's enough space for my OS and all the games I'm playing right now. All my other stuff is on the dirt-cheap platters I've accumulated over the years. You can buy a 1000GB platter to store your anime fansubs for like 40 dollars.
Just curious, since we're talking about boot speeds, who else here never turns their PC off? I don't even really know how long it takes my PC to boot up anymore so that aspect of a SSD hasn't ever really appealed to me.
Just curious, since we're talking about boot speeds, who else here never turns their PC off? I don't even really know how long it takes my PC to boot up anymore so that aspect of a SSD hasn't ever really appealed to me.
Same. It's sleeping or hibernating most of the time. I even do the same with my netbook. That said, hibernation in Windows is never that great - Chrome and Firefox both do weird things after resuming from a hibernation, mostly involving freezing, briefly unfreezing, then freezing again for about five minutes afterwards. It happens on both my reasonably higher-end desktop and my netbook.
Just curious, since we're talking about boot speeds, who else here never turns their PC off? I don't even really know how long it takes my PC to boot up anymore so that aspect of a SSD hasn't ever really appealed to me.
Well, when you first install your OS you have to reboot a bunch of times. And it takes like 10-20 seconds depending on your motherboard's POST sequence and how many drives you have installed. But instead of going "ugh, not again," whenever it asks to restart you'll be like, "awesome, I love watching this speed demon boot up." Of course, once all your programs are installed and the Windows rot sets in, your boot times get slower and it isn't so awesome (20-40 seconds). But it's not about the boot times; it's the everyday performance in desktop apps that will spoil you and make every other computer look like a piece of shit.
I turn off my PC at night and when I'm at work, unless I've got some big download going, because the noise bothers me and booting only takes a little longer than resuming from sleep/hibernate anyway.
I leave my computer running all the time as it's my central media server (and not just throughout the house, but also to my iphone.) Still, I've been planning for a while to grab an SSD, but I've been trying to wait till I can actually grab a decent one in a futureshop store (as I've got all these saved up gift cards for it.)
Ego on
Erik
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Donovan PuppyfuckerA dagger in the dark isworth a thousand swords in the morningRegistered Userregular
edited May 2011
My computer gets turned off and on maybe three times/day. If I'm not using it, it's off.
And from power on to actually being able to do anything in Windows takes at least a full minute.
SSD, 2x(2)gb graphic cards, 3d visuals, and 6 core processors are already out.
This is a giant leap in technology which will probably be consumer friendly cost wise in 3 years.
3 Years is about the time i will be looking at another upgrade/new PC anyways so that works. My PC is primarily for gaming and a bit for storage. SSD's really make no difference in what I personally use my PC for. Things loading a few miliseconds faster really is not something i care about. Windows already boots in 30 seconds, thats plenty fast. SSD's are just simply too expensive per gig to be practical right now.
The main reason you shouldn't get an SSD is that once you use an SSD on your main system, you'll become frustrated every time you have to use a computer running on a normal HDD. An SSD won't really improve the performance of your games, but it will improve almost every other aspect of your home computing experience.
If your new computer is based on the z68 chipset, you can go out and add a smaller 20GB SSD and have the system use it as a really large cache for your normal HDD using Intel's new SRT SSD caching feature. The feature will basically load the most frequently accessed blocks on your normal HDD to the SSD, allowing you to take advantage of the super quick access times of the SSD while you still have access to the large amounts of space on your traditional HDD.
krapst78 on
Hello! My name is Inigo Montoya! You killed my father prepare to die!
Looking for a Hardcore Fantasy Extraction Shooter? - Dark and Darker
Games are only getting bigger. An affordable SSD needs to come out at 500 GB right now before I could really consider it more than an expensive novelty. Otherwise, cutting down the once-a-day loading time of an OS from about 20 to 30 seconds to 5 or 10 really doesn't warrant it.
Uh, what. Games aren't the only thing you do with a computer. Booting Windows isn't the only time the hard drive comes into play. Whenever an application needs to hit up the disk, that takes 20 ms on a platter drive, versus 0.1 ms on an SSD. That's 200 times faster. And it shows: pretty much everything is faster and more responsive with an SSD.
Which would be lovely if I could actually tell the difference between a fifth of a second and a twentieth of one. Here's a shocker: can you distinguish between 1/10 of a second and 1/100 when opening a blank Word file? I can't. Maybe I'm getting old. The only time loading times bother me are in games which, collectively, take up several hundred gigabytes because I don't like to uninstall and reinstall things.
Just curious, since we're talking about boot speeds, who else here never turns their PC off? I don't even really know how long it takes my PC to boot up anymore so that aspect of a SSD hasn't ever really appealed to me.
Well, when you first install your OS you have to reboot a bunch of times. And it takes like 10-20 seconds depending on your motherboard's POST sequence and how many drives you have installed. But instead of going "ugh, not again," whenever it asks to restart you'll be like, "awesome, I love watching this speed demon boot up." Of course, once all your programs are installed and the Windows rot sets in, your boot times get slower and it isn't so awesome (20-40 seconds).
So, basically, you're describing an excitement I don't feel in the first place--I've never looked at the 4 to 5 seconds it takes Windows 7 to boot up after a few seconds in the BIOS on my computer and went, "Wow! I hate my life so much right now! This is the longest five seconds I've ever, ever experienced, including right before I had surgery in a third world country." I've seen a laptop boot up with an SSD, very much faster, but never went, "Wow! This is like a drug-induced high, but really, really fast!" I thought it was neat. Not enough to buy the laptop, but I thought it was neat.
I used to shut off my computer once a month to once a week, depending on the situation. It occurred to me I was wasting a lot of juice running it while I was asleep, I started shutting it down daily. But I'm not wanting to slit my wrists that once a morning when I have to boot up my machine.
Frankly, I like consistency. Cutting down Browser opening time from a quarter second to a fiftieth of that....doesn't really attract me. Now, if I could cut down Shogun 2 pre-battle from 15 seconds to 3 (which is as fast as I've seen the game demonstrated on a high-end SSD), that I'd like, but not enough to pay the cost of moving my game library onto an SSD.
Now, the idea of using a smaller, less costly SSD as a cache is much more attractive. It isn't a huge amount of money that I'd feel would be better going to internal or external equipment. It's a lot more promising that my current experience with SSD-equpped laptops, which, as it happens, did not leave me thinking, "Oh my God, I absolutely need the ability to open sixty individual games of solitaire. Maybe even six hundred. At a click."
Don't get me wrong, it's cool. So are certain types of snowglobes. Paying a few extra hundred dollars for that privilege is not for me personally.
If you've ever played an MMO where it loads zone files, you absolutely can tell a difference. For instance, logging into World of Warcraft or Dark Age of Camelot takes maybe a second or two. As opposed to the 2 minute jobber it used to.
bowen on
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
Back when I played WoW, I....never had a two-minute load to enter a zone. Either from the menu or between them. I'm not being facetious, I really can't think of such a case. I don't think I've ever had a minute either often either, though at a minute, I'd probably think I'd either been disconnected or something had gone wrong, and hard to the task manager.
I think about 30 seconds would be typical. It's possible the game has gotten a lot bigger since I quit in WotLK. Also, shrinking that down to a second or less would be extremely noticeable, unlike "Oh, wow, this is so awesome, Notepad takes 0.02 ms to open! How did I live without this!" The constraint comes back to size, though. How big does WoW run you know? With the most recent expansion? Pretty big. I actually quit WoW because I felt it was taking away from the large variety of other games I wanted to play--that just highlights the problem.
Then, to add insult to injury (not to mention even swing further off topic), I'm a big mod guy. It's one of the reasons I buy the PC versions of games at all. I actually keep two additional copies of my installation of Oblivion simply to make modding easier, see what breaks the game, etc. The idea of using an SSD to be able to switch between copies of Oblivion in a matter of seconds is really awesome...until I think of the real-estate cost for that one game. And then all the other games.
Then again, if you were only using a desktop to play WoW and a handful of other smaller games regularly, I can see the attraction. Someone else already said it, but I think that money would better go to a better GPU (and given how much SSDs cost, you could get a kickass GPU at that), or other upgrades first.
Yeah, that's a lot worse than I remember. Seriously, the longest loading time I can think of that wasn't caused by a crash/freeze/disconnection/whatever was probably still no more than a minute, and for Ogrimmar (I logged out a lot in Ogrimmar). I mostly remember because it was still not enough time for me to actually get any sort of useful reading done.
By "utilization", you mean disk space, not memory, right?
Correct. And yeah ogrimmar is much more... intensive now. Before cataclysm it took probably about 30-45 seconds, and after I was hitting almost 2 minutes. Long enough to go warm myself up some food.
bowen on
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
So since we're leaning into WoW, looking back at my PC specs, how high can I crank the graphics on this? The overall slider is at "Good". Can I make things any better?
WoW, and most Blizzard games (Starcraft II being the big exception) tend to be pretty good about it. Crank it up to 11, try not to run anything in the background, and you should be fine. No harm in trying.
WoW, and most Blizzard games (Starcraft II being the big exception) tend to be pretty good about it. Crank it up to 11, try not to run anything in the background, and you should be fine. No harm in trying.
I'll probably run Skype tho. That'll suck up some juice for sure. Maybe I'll just leave Particle at Ultra since omg pretty.
At the moment, SSDs remain firmly in the realm of the luxury item. It's certainly nice to have one in your PC if you have an extra hundred bucks or two to spend, but it's by no means a necessity, and well down on the priority list of components. Having or not having one will not make or break any single task you want to use your computer for.
I hardly think $100 is luxury when the average cost of good video cards is double or triple that. I think I got an SSD for $120. That's only ... what $60 more than a 1 TB drive? Sure, but I don't even come close to using the 120 GBs as it is, fuck if I can use 1 TB. It'd just be backups of backups of backups, which, you can spend another $60 on and get a 1TB drive just for that.
bowen on
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
I hardly think $100 is luxury when the average cost of good video cards is double or triple that.
You can get a video card that will play any current game at high settings for $200 or less, so let's not get hyperbolic. But besides that, to me a GPU is a make or break component, assuming you're doing any gaming (which most of us here are). If my GPU is too weak to perform the tasks I want to perform well, that's a problem that needs to be resolved. Having to wait an extra 4-5 seconds for the system and programs to load is something I can easily live with.
I think I got an SSD for $120. That's only ... what $60 more than a 1 TB drive? Sure, but I don't even come close to using the 120 GBs as it is, fuck if I can use 1 TB.
My Steam folder alone is 150GB and I have less than half the games I own installed. It's nice to talk about having a moderately sized SSD to install your OS/programs/games on and use a platter drive for storage...assuming you don't have that many games and programs, or assuming you have a lot of money to spend (which makes this discussion moot anyway). For a lot of people, though, it doesn't quite survive an encounter with reality.
Gaslight on
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Donovan PuppyfuckerA dagger in the dark isworth a thousand swords in the morningRegistered Userregular
edited May 2011
Who is 'most people'?
I've had this computer for four years, I play games on it all the time.
I couldn't speculate on who 'most people' is, since I never said 'most people.' ;-) I just said 'a lot of people.' There's a difference. I don't presume that the majority of people are in a siuation similar to mine, but i'm pretty certain just from reading discussions of gaming and hardware needs on this forum for a while that there are quite a few.
Don't get me wrong, i'd love to have a SSD, but I dont consider one a necessity or even a priority. I built my PC on a budget and if that budget had had the headroom needed for a SSD then that extra money probably would have gone into something else, some other luxury that I wanted more.
All my computers now are SSD drives only and I am certainly not going back, nor will I wait 3 more years until prices drop a few bucks.
A good SSD drive is absolutely worth the money even at current price levels. No single upgrade to my computer has ever given me this much direct visible day to day performance.
All my computers now are SSD drives only and I am certainly not going back, nor will I wait 3 more years until prices drop a few bucks.
A good SSD drive is absolutely worth the money even at current price levels. No single upgrade to my computer has ever given me this much direct visible day to day performance.
Hey man, if your budget and storage needs are such that you can do an all-SSD rig, that's awesome. But not everybody is in that position.
I agree that a GPU is a lot more important than an SSD for a gaming build, given that while an SSD improves plenty of things, an insufficient GPU outright stops you from being able to run a lot of games.
That said, a nice SSD is still a good investment that offers a really impressive performance increase. Even just for core apps that you use more often than others.
An SSD is something I expect/look forward to having in my next build, in a couple of years when I can get one at least big enough to hold my OS and most of my commonly used programs and games at a reasonable price. They just aren't there yet though in my estimation.
The problem is dude that "a couple years" can be a long time. You could get hit by a bus and die tomorrow.
To give you a sense of what "a couple years" is like, people could get married and have children enrolled in 2nd grade within the spawn of "a couple years".
And "a couple years" ago facebook didn't even exist, and there wasn't even an iPhone and the Motorola Razr was the hottest shit out.
Plenty of SSDs will hold an entire OS and several applications. Just spend a little extra now. Saving a few bucks is not worth the wait of "a couple years". Else, your always going to be a generation behind.
The problem is dude that "a couple years" can be a long time. You could get hit by a bus and die tomorrow.
Oh God, you're right. Suddenly I'm aware of my own mortality, the uncertainty of life, and the soullessness of my humdrum existence. I have to go out and live while I can!
Coincidentally, after having this epiphany, having the latest and greatest computer hardware suddenly means even less to me than it did before.
To give you a sense of what "a couple years" is like, people could get married and have children enrolled in 2nd grade within the spawn of "a couple years".
They let two year olds into second grade?
Plenty of SSDs will hold an entire OS and several applications. Just spend a little extra now. Saving a few bucks is not worth the wait of "a couple years".
Your exhortations are a little late, since I made these decisions and built my system back in January.
Else, your always going to be a generation behind.
If this was a thing that kept me up nights, I wouldn't have bought a Phenom II X4 literally two weeks before the Sandy Bridge CPUs came out.
Clearly, always having a system at the cutting edge is something that's important to you. It's not something that's important to me, it's not something that's important to everybody or even the majority of people. For a lot of people building systems on a set budget and assessing what they really need to have a computer that will do what they want it to do, an SSD is an item that very easily falls into the "I can do without it" column. I'm sure judging by your passion that you love having SSDs and couldn't imagine ever going without one now just like a person who has the cash and lifestyle to drive a Mercedes Benz SLS couldn't imagine ever driving a Toyota Camry again (even if all you do is commute to and from work every day). Me, I'm quite content with waiting an extra 5 seconds for my OS and programs to load until I build my next system sometime around mid 2013.
In addition to pointing out that Facebook, the iPhone, and no current 2nd graders all existed a couple years ago, I'd have to say that SSDs are still expensive enough that they're far from a no-brainer unless you're spending enough on computer parts to disqualify you from the really nitty-gritty budget conversations. I mean sure, everyone can quibble over whether water cooling or a massive metal aftermarket heatsink or a giant, beautiful, toolless case or RAID 0+1 or SLI/Crossfire are worth it, but those are the kinds of things you're only looking at if you're already buying parts that are listed on the "high end" part of the chart. SSDs are pretty much in that category too: nobody is arguing that they aren't nice to have when you're booting up, and most people will agree that they make a pretty big difference in some applications, but the argument against them is that for the price, you're better off upgrading some other part in your computer unless the main things you do with your PC are starting up Windows or getting angry over spending another 15 seconds waiting for a level to load.
People who are looking to buy the best computers they can on a fairly modest budget are going to be hard pressed cutting their 3d card quality down by a couple hundred bucks or skimping on the CPU by a couple hundred bucks just so they can stick an SSD in their computer when the technology is pretty clearly in the "still getting into mainstream" phase.
I'm not a "naysayer." I'm sure having an SSD is very nice, and I look forward to the technology coming down in price and becoming mainstream. But right now, it simply ain't worth it for me and a lot of other people.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs
This is a giant leap in technology which will probably be consumer friendly cost wise in 3 years.
The hard drive is the slowest component in any computer. Even a low-end PC benefits from improved hard drive performance. If you're planning to use this computer for literally anything other than games ever, an SSD is totally worth the money. If you can find $200 in the budget, absolutely get an SSD. It won't affect your frame rates in Crysis, but it affects just about everything else.
"Abloo bloo it's too small, platters have more space"
So get both? I have a 180GB SSD and it's enough space for my OS and all the games I'm playing right now. All my other stuff is on the dirt-cheap platters I've accumulated over the years. You can buy a 1000GB platter to store your anime fansubs for like 40 dollars.
I do about once a week.
Which is annoying.
I turn off my PC at night and when I'm at work, unless I've got some big download going, because the noise bothers me and booting only takes a little longer than resuming from sleep/hibernate anyway.
And from power on to actually being able to do anything in Windows takes at least a full minute.
3 Years is about the time i will be looking at another upgrade/new PC anyways so that works. My PC is primarily for gaming and a bit for storage. SSD's really make no difference in what I personally use my PC for. Things loading a few miliseconds faster really is not something i care about. Windows already boots in 30 seconds, thats plenty fast. SSD's are just simply too expensive per gig to be practical right now.
If your new computer is based on the z68 chipset, you can go out and add a smaller 20GB SSD and have the system use it as a really large cache for your normal HDD using Intel's new SRT SSD caching feature. The feature will basically load the most frequently accessed blocks on your normal HDD to the SSD, allowing you to take advantage of the super quick access times of the SSD while you still have access to the large amounts of space on your traditional HDD.
Looking for a Hardcore Fantasy Extraction Shooter? - Dark and Darker
Which would be lovely if I could actually tell the difference between a fifth of a second and a twentieth of one. Here's a shocker: can you distinguish between 1/10 of a second and 1/100 when opening a blank Word file? I can't. Maybe I'm getting old. The only time loading times bother me are in games which, collectively, take up several hundred gigabytes because I don't like to uninstall and reinstall things.
So, basically, you're describing an excitement I don't feel in the first place--I've never looked at the 4 to 5 seconds it takes Windows 7 to boot up after a few seconds in the BIOS on my computer and went, "Wow! I hate my life so much right now! This is the longest five seconds I've ever, ever experienced, including right before I had surgery in a third world country." I've seen a laptop boot up with an SSD, very much faster, but never went, "Wow! This is like a drug-induced high, but really, really fast!" I thought it was neat. Not enough to buy the laptop, but I thought it was neat.
I used to shut off my computer once a month to once a week, depending on the situation. It occurred to me I was wasting a lot of juice running it while I was asleep, I started shutting it down daily. But I'm not wanting to slit my wrists that once a morning when I have to boot up my machine.
Frankly, I like consistency. Cutting down Browser opening time from a quarter second to a fiftieth of that....doesn't really attract me. Now, if I could cut down Shogun 2 pre-battle from 15 seconds to 3 (which is as fast as I've seen the game demonstrated on a high-end SSD), that I'd like, but not enough to pay the cost of moving my game library onto an SSD.
Now, the idea of using a smaller, less costly SSD as a cache is much more attractive. It isn't a huge amount of money that I'd feel would be better going to internal or external equipment. It's a lot more promising that my current experience with SSD-equpped laptops, which, as it happens, did not leave me thinking, "Oh my God, I absolutely need the ability to open sixty individual games of solitaire. Maybe even six hundred. At a click."
Don't get me wrong, it's cool. So are certain types of snowglobes. Paying a few extra hundred dollars for that privilege is not for me personally.
I think about 30 seconds would be typical. It's possible the game has gotten a lot bigger since I quit in WotLK. Also, shrinking that down to a second or less would be extremely noticeable, unlike "Oh, wow, this is so awesome, Notepad takes 0.02 ms to open! How did I live without this!" The constraint comes back to size, though. How big does WoW run you know? With the most recent expansion? Pretty big. I actually quit WoW because I felt it was taking away from the large variety of other games I wanted to play--that just highlights the problem.
Then, to add insult to injury (not to mention even swing further off topic), I'm a big mod guy. It's one of the reasons I buy the PC versions of games at all. I actually keep two additional copies of my installation of Oblivion simply to make modding easier, see what breaks the game, etc. The idea of using an SSD to be able to switch between copies of Oblivion in a matter of seconds is really awesome...until I think of the real-estate cost for that one game. And then all the other games.
Then again, if you were only using a desktop to play WoW and a handful of other smaller games regularly, I can see the attraction. Someone else already said it, but I think that money would better go to a better GPU (and given how much SSDs cost, you could get a kickass GPU at that), or other upgrades first.
I am probably at 65% drive utilization between wow and a few other games, visual studio, etc.
By "utilization", you mean disk space, not memory, right?
I haven't even staerted the game yet, actually. But I doubt I will.
I'll probably run Skype tho. That'll suck up some juice for sure. Maybe I'll just leave Particle at Ultra since omg pretty.
You can get a video card that will play any current game at high settings for $200 or less, so let's not get hyperbolic. But besides that, to me a GPU is a make or break component, assuming you're doing any gaming (which most of us here are). If my GPU is too weak to perform the tasks I want to perform well, that's a problem that needs to be resolved. Having to wait an extra 4-5 seconds for the system and programs to load is something I can easily live with.
My Steam folder alone is 150GB and I have less than half the games I own installed. It's nice to talk about having a moderately sized SSD to install your OS/programs/games on and use a platter drive for storage...assuming you don't have that many games and programs, or assuming you have a lot of money to spend (which makes this discussion moot anyway). For a lot of people, though, it doesn't quite survive an encounter with reality.
I've had this computer for four years, I play games on it all the time.
It has a 160 GB hard drive, with 85 GB free...
Don't get me wrong, i'd love to have a SSD, but I dont consider one a necessity or even a priority. I built my PC on a budget and if that budget had had the headroom needed for a SSD then that extra money probably would have gone into something else, some other luxury that I wanted more.
A good SSD drive is absolutely worth the money even at current price levels. No single upgrade to my computer has ever given me this much direct visible day to day performance.
Hey man, if your budget and storage needs are such that you can do an all-SSD rig, that's awesome. But not everybody is in that position.
That said, a nice SSD is still a good investment that offers a really impressive performance increase. Even just for core apps that you use more often than others.
To give you a sense of what "a couple years" is like, people could get married and have children enrolled in 2nd grade within the spawn of "a couple years".
And "a couple years" ago facebook didn't even exist, and there wasn't even an iPhone and the Motorola Razr was the hottest shit out.
Plenty of SSDs will hold an entire OS and several applications. Just spend a little extra now. Saving a few bucks is not worth the wait of "a couple years". Else, your always going to be a generation behind.
Oh God, you're right. Suddenly I'm aware of my own mortality, the uncertainty of life, and the soullessness of my humdrum existence. I have to go out and live while I can!
Coincidentally, after having this epiphany, having the latest and greatest computer hardware suddenly means even less to me than it did before.
They let two year olds into second grade?
Your exhortations are a little late, since I made these decisions and built my system back in January.
If this was a thing that kept me up nights, I wouldn't have bought a Phenom II X4 literally two weeks before the Sandy Bridge CPUs came out.
Clearly, always having a system at the cutting edge is something that's important to you. It's not something that's important to me, it's not something that's important to everybody or even the majority of people. For a lot of people building systems on a set budget and assessing what they really need to have a computer that will do what they want it to do, an SSD is an item that very easily falls into the "I can do without it" column. I'm sure judging by your passion that you love having SSDs and couldn't imagine ever going without one now just like a person who has the cash and lifestyle to drive a Mercedes Benz SLS couldn't imagine ever driving a Toyota Camry again (even if all you do is commute to and from work every day). Me, I'm quite content with waiting an extra 5 seconds for my OS and programs to load until I build my next system sometime around mid 2013.
People who are looking to buy the best computers they can on a fairly modest budget are going to be hard pressed cutting their 3d card quality down by a couple hundred bucks or skimping on the CPU by a couple hundred bucks just so they can stick an SSD in their computer when the technology is pretty clearly in the "still getting into mainstream" phase.
The difference is night and day.
Anand has said it for over a year (a couple years now?)
an SSD is bar none the best upgrade you can buy for your computer these days.
I could never go back.
edit: lol @ guy thinking it's an extra 5 seconds to load stuff up with an HDD. Try 30+. Every. Single. Time. You. Turn. On. The. Computer.