Very interesting indeed. The really good info is in the comments afterward.

I've used SSDs. I know what they're like, and for laptops I would use nothing else on account of the greater physical robustness.

But I can't agree with the "Crazy/Hot" scale. The fact of the matter is, outside a few corner cases, SSDs for desktop storage don't provide any particularly useful performance advantage. OK, your system boots faster. This will add up to entire minutes saved up over an entire year!

I will lose more time to having to replace faulty disks, restore from backup, and redo work lost since the prior backup, than an SSD will ever save. The SSD will save a few second a day. The failure will cause downtime of several days. That's simply not a good trade-off.

I mean, sure, if I were compiling Linux kernels or Chrome all day, every day, then yes, I would probably get a net time win from using the SSD. But I'm not; nor are most people. Continuous high levels of random I/O just aren't a common workload.

Yes, it would be nice to have my computer boot up more quickly, but I just power it up before I take my shower in the morning, and it's ready for me when I need it with no loss of my time. Better performance? An SSD isn't going to speed up my internet connection, and just how much faster do I need my spreadsheets to re-calcs? (To my eye they appear to be instantaneous already.)

I guess I'm a Luddite at heart, but to me living with an SSD brings to mind the legend of the Sword of Damocles. I'll pass, for now at least.

tanstaafl.