What about the price you pay for that performance? Personally, I cant see spending the outrageous prices being asked (now) for SSD's. True, like everything else in the PC/Electronics world economies of scale will inevitably kick in and the prices will drop.
The prices are the thing that is holding back widespread adoption of the technology. And prices have been dropping and will continue to do so. When I first started looking at the technology, the 80GB Intel drives were pushing nearly $600. Today, you can find the generation 2 of that drive for $250.
Currently on newegg I can get a single 120GB SSD for an average price of approx $400.00 USD (price ranges from $255-$1285), or I can buy over 4TB of mechanical drives for the same price! That's bang for the buck performance!
Well, 4TB of space is great if you need lots of storage. But I don't need that much space...it will simply sit there unused. However, with my SSD drive, I reap the benefits every single day of that drive. I boot faster, I scan for viruses and malware faster, I don't have to defrag, I don't run Prefetch, I don't have to have Windows search enabled, my games load almost instantly, and my machine shuts down in about 5 seconds.
Those of you running SSD's... are you running them in laptops where there is a strong need, in a desktop used for power computing/gaming, or did you all just win the lottery?
I'm running mine in a desktop. I built the machine in July of 2009, and I went with a 1TB mechanical hard drive. While I had no qualms about my performance, being a Systems Engineer for a living and living and breathing technology, I had to find out for myself just how good/bad were these SSD drives. Once the price dropped to under $300 for the Intel X25-M G2 drive, it wasn't much more costly than a Raptor or Velociraptor drive..so I decided to splurge and ponied up $289 for my 80GB hard drive.
My overall opinion is that the drive is fantastic...but nowhere near necessary for most average computer users. The cost is simply prohibitive. But for a gamer, techie, or computer enthusiast..it's one of the most beneficial upgrades that you can make to most PC's. Lots of people invest money in new video cards to get a few more Frames Per Second, they upgrade from Dual core CPU's to Quad core CPU's to get more crunching power, they increase RAM hoping to see a nice return on investment. In some respects, they get some performance gains, but usually in the area of 2%-10%. With the SSD drive though, the performance gains are substantial and they come into play every second that you run your operating system. I think it speaks for itself that most people who have invested in the technology, generally don't try to persuade others against a purchase. There is often very little buyers regret with SSD drives.
