SSD or no?

With the SSD it will improve loading times and saving times for pretty much everything. Aditionally someone posted that it only took 15 seconds to boot up on a ssd which is amazing since it takes 8 minutes to boot windows 7 on my crappy laptop right now.
SSDs are shock proof so they probably can last for a very long time. from what i have found there are no studys yet since they are so new but they should be able to last much longer then hdds. 4 years is fine should last a while longer then that.

Originally posted by AmbientChong11 MTBF for SSDs are about 1000000 hours, maybe more or less, but these aren't in real-time. Don't worry about it failing within 4+ years. SSD for the OS and any intensive apps.

G2 Intel SSDs are rated at 1,200,000 hours MTBF. Last I checked, 1TB HDDs are rated at 500,000 hours MTBF.

The recently released (a week ago) specs for the new G3 Intel SSDs coming out are listed as having 4 times the lifespan of G2 models.

You definitely don't have to worry about modern SSD lifespans, they are much more reliable than mechanical HDDs.

Originally posted by maxyme Is there a release date yet on the intel g3 ssd?

Same as it has been for months and months. Q4 2010 - Q1 2011.

I use MaximumPC and Tom's Hardware.

MaximumPC FTW    I like them.  I also Like CPU.

If the G3 SSD's come out before DSO releases the Signature build, Ill use a small one for OS and a BIG one for the games and apps.

As usual, Dragoonseal is spot on.

But the problem with that is that smaller SSDs are slower, and/or lose performance easier or faster. Write speed will be the most noticeably affected, but go small enough and even read speeds will start to nose dive.

One of the biggest secrets of SSD speeds are their highly parallel nature. They have many NAND chips all working together like a miniature RAID array, with the SSD controller tying them all together (and usually being the main bottleneck). Take an 80GB Intel SSD for example, it is a 10 channel drive. That means it has 10 NAND chips of 8GB working in parallel. The 40GB model is only 5 channel and noticeably slower in a lot of regards, capping out at 170MB/s sequential read speeds (vs 250MB/s) and 40MB/s write speeds (vs 80MB/s), as it only has 5 NAND chips working in parallel.

On top of this the smaller SSDs usually have a lot less over provisioned spaced for wear leveling and keeping performance up, so their performance can drop quicker with use and when you fill them up.

All in all you'd be better off just going with one big SSD instead of trying to stuff the OS onto a little one.

My wife has a new Alienware $2500 system, I had a off the shelf HP (that I stuck an ATI 5850 in after freeing up power by removing the two hard drives and dropping in an 256 MB Corsair P256 SSD). My system boot faster than hers and she has a Raid 0 10,000 RPM drive array. I would laugh because when we played MMOs together and we went to a loading screen, my crappy system would beat hers into the area. Sure, she smoked me on frame rates, but women typically don't care about frame rates (at least my wife doesn't), they just see boot / loading times.

Originally posted by Dragoonseal But the problem with that is that smaller SSDs are slower, and/or lose performance easier or faster. Write speed will be the most noticeably affected, but go small enough and even read speeds will start to nose dive. One of the biggest secrets of SSD speeds are their highly parallel nature. They have many NAND chips all working together like a miniature RAID array, with the SSD controller tying them all together (and usually being the main bottleneck). Take an 80GB Intel SSD for example, it is a 10 channel drive. That means it has 10 NAND chips of 8GB working in parallel. The 40GB model is only 5 channel and noticeably slower in a lot of regards, capping out at 170MB/s sequential read speeds (vs 250MB/s) and 40MB/s write speeds (vs 80MB/s), as it only has 5 NAND chips working in parallel. On top of this the smaller SSDs usually have a lot less over provisioned spaced for wear leveling and keeping performance up, so their performance can drop quicker with use and when you fill them up. All in all you'd be better off just going with one big SSD instead of trying to stuff the OS onto a little one.