Mike ...my first was an OCZ....only problem was it was too small....60G doesn't cut it.....though it seems OK now it's on the laptop.....[less crap on that]...;)

so what exactly do you stuff into the ssd but leave on the hdd? do you chuck your steam folder into the ssd for example? (apparently i have like 70 odd gb from only a handful of games.. guess it's the mmo.)

I have my games in their own partition on one of my 1.5Tb HDs. The only games on the SSD are my Sins mods (that's where the game puts them) and my UT3 custom maps.

I have a partition here for all my documents, files, pics, vids etc too. The another 1.5Tb drive for daily backups and an extra 500Gb drive for extra backups.

I used symlinks to put important games on the SSD until I got a second one, then I had the OS on one and games on the other.  Now with the third, pretty much everything I use is on the SSDs,  The last HD I use is backups only now.

Went from Vista 32 bit to Win 7 64 2 weeks ago... and now added an SSD for the OS. I'm in heaven!

For those that can afford it.. after feeding their families, paying bills, groceries (ha!), spending 12 bucks a day just for gas, forking out for medication, dealing with intensely increased light bills, putting aside funds for emergencies..etc etc

 Are SSD’s worth it? Answer: YES

 Agreed.

You could apply that to any tech item on the market.  I'm not sure what exactly your point is.

Simple enough....

....there's always more important things to spend your money on...;)

I wouldn't say 'always'.  Yes, people prioritize, but that could be equally applied to almost anything on the market.

As such, it's meaningless in the context of this discussion.  Nothing is worth it if you can't afford it.

I'm not buying a house anytime soon, but it's worth it if you can afford it.

Oh...FFS ....if you have a few hundred to spend upgrading a computer...it's WORTH IT TO SPEND IT ON A SSD.

There.

Happy now?....;p

I think that's what Brad said in the initial post.

(Now that I'm done annoying you for the moment, I'm goin to bed.  Night all.)

Needless to say....my 'ploy' to do a hand-me-down upgrade of my SSD kinda went south....the recipient of the hand-me-down...an Acer Travelmate I paid about 300 for just decided to toast it's recharge plug....and it ain't worth it to fork out 150 more for a new MoBo.... easier to bin it and get something newer.....

Still....means I have a couple of gig of ram AND an SSD for the next one....;p

Indeed, that's why I have a nice new Razer mouse

Now I kinda wish I could buy a laptop without a drive in it.  I wonder what HP sales would say to that request.  Heh.

The gaming laptop brands do allow this.

Would love one, but just can't justify the expense.  So much software is so bloated, I need high capacity, and regular hard drives were still more than ten times the bang for the buck than SSD the last time I was in the market for a hard drive ... sucked, but I really needed a lot of capacity, and SSDs were still too expensive for the capacity.

They offer cache ones now that cache the most used files from your HD.

Sandisk and Crucial and Corsair have them, IIRC.  Probably others.  I haven't checked the reviews but if those had been available earlier I probably would've saved some moneys.

Alright, I finally broke down and ordered it. I went with this:

OCZ Technology 256GB Vertex 4 Series SATA 6.0 GB/s 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive (SSD) With Industry's Highest 120K IOPS And 5-Year Warranty - VTX4-25SAT3-256G

Seems real fast and it has a 5 year warranty, so it must have a good rate of non failures.

I feel like I need to learn more about the elementary basics of what an SSD is.

More than that though (per perhaps less than that?) is that I'd like to know if any computers start with an SSD in place, and if not, why not.

( or rather, why do we always have to manually install SSDs ... or at least that is the tone here? let me know please )

They are starting to become fairly common in higher end laptops. Not so much in desktops yet.

I see. So the general rule, then, would be to either buy a laptop with one, or if having a desktop, to upgrade immediately

I guess it depends on the rest of the rig as to whether an SSD is worth it then? (even if the answer is usually going to be yes.) ... ?

Right. If you have an older mobo with SATAII, as I do, there is some gain with an SSD but the cost is high for what you gain. I don't think an SSD is a good investment on such a machine, but that's just me. You won't really get the full performance gains or speed out of an SSD unless you have SATAIII so I plan on holding off on buying one until my next build.

about that ocz vertex 4 Anthony bought, i hope it never fails because ocz's tech support is atrocious. i hate saying that because i used their ram for years and years in my rigs and put more in customer rigs along the way. when their customer service was phone based, it was great. when they changed to strictly email based support from china or wherever it is, it took a nosedive immediately. heck, i called corsair to ask questions about which drive of theirs to buy and explained that i was calling them due to issues with the ocz drive i had at the time and believe it or not, the corsair tech guy helped me get the ocz drive to work as it should. needless to say, i dumped that ocz drive and bought a corsair piece. i've changed capacities a few times in the last 18 months or so but stayed with corsair until the last couple of weeks. i bought a samsung 840 pro 256 and i'm loving it so much i may get another after Christmas and raid those babies.

wizard, i've had a couple of customers whose rigs have sata II motherboards in them who wanted an ssd installed and they have to yet to complain about the performance increases they saw. granted, most new rigs have sata III boards but quite a few people have sata II rigs yet. for those, i don't recommend the higher-end drives but the mid-range drives instead. for example, instead of a corsair force GT, they could go with a corsair force or corsair nova unit. the corsair nova series is great with sata II machines. that series is aimed at budget minded folks and if i remember correctly, it's strictly sata II. for its price, it's hard to beat.

I'm one of those with SATA II and got a SATA III drive in case I needed to transfer to a new MB. Love the improvement - I know I'm not getting the full benefit but the benefit I did receive was amazing.