Vas said:

Aven, any opinion on benefits/lack of benefits of an SSD for gaming?

SSD benefits any application, especially applications (such as games) where it has to swap a lot of information in and out of main memory. You're essentially removing seek time from your secondary memory, everything is right there and ready to be transferred immediately because it doesn't have to wait for the platter to come around. Load times go down, boot times go down, money in your wallet goes down. The biggest problem with SSD is that there is a number of times you can write to it. The better drives are smarter about it, and some will even switch the drive into read-only mode when it hits that boundary so that you can copy your data onto a new drive. OSX, unfortunately, doesn't have good SSD support in the operating system, but Windows 7 does. I'm seriously considering picking one up in the next couple months. Probably one of those 64GB Crucial ones that I posted up above. I typically don't need a lot of hard drive space for applications and the operating system at one time.

SSD is pretty damn awesome. You'll be amazed at how quickly software loads. I got myself a 64 GB SSD from Corsair and it houses Windows 7 and my programs. From a cold boot, I'm looking at a fully loaded OS in mere seconds and applications load nearly instantly.

But for gaming? The game will load up faster, sure. Once the game is running, however, you likely won't notice anything different. I recommend getting yourself a small SSD for your OS and key applications, and putting your games, movies, porn etc on a regular hard drive.

If you're looking for a good SSD Benchmark, AnandTech has a good one.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/SSD/65

I think that was going to be my plan for the next system. A 64GB SSD for the OS and a few choice "core" apps. I've heard you'd actually be hard pressed to hit the write limit during a normal lifespan / normal use of an SSD.

Yea, it's assuming you use your computer a lot and don't upgrade very often.