Personally I've never used more than 80 GB on a computer so I've been happy with my 120 GB SSD. I'd check newegg if you haven't already. They have some cheap 512 GB SSDs for around 800 USD. You'll notice the price is nearly linear. A normal 120 GB is 200 USD so buying 4 of them to get 480 GB would cost you 800 USD. This trend stops for some of the larger drives. I saw a 2TB drive for 3K USD a while back though which was insane deal. Can't find the link atm though. I believe it was a PCI-Express one.

Promethium - yeah, I considered that, but it's still too expensive. I mean, yes I've been drooling about an SSD setup, but realistically it doesn't make almost any sense in investing in one at this time (as the storage that I would require is too much for the money I could spend elsewhere). I'd be happy to consider it if SSD's didn't ramp up at 3x the normal rate in price as size increases and were at least 2x cheaper on the baseline. As far as I can tell there hasn't been much change in this respect since SSD's hit the market.

If you *need* it, then price is not a factor. Either you need that much space because you cannot get work done otherwise, or because it will make your work so much faster.

Otherwise, you don't *need* it.

I'm sorry to sound a bit counter-uptight towards your latching on to a single word, but please consider that something that doesn't lend itself to a black-and-white classification can still be a valid reason for needing it. In this case the fact that I can't split up a 300GB sample library because of technical reasons. I don't *need* the half-TB SSD existentially, but I do need it functionally and grammatically speaking - as in I can *live* without it, but it can get *frickin' annoying at times*. Or worded in a less vernacular fashion, if you will: for technical reasons I require the drive to be at least 350GB in size (which I rounded to half a TB because I'd be able to add other stuff there as well - this is where video editing comes in). Which in turn directly lends to the title of this thread - because the price literally is THE factor.

Which, in yet other words, is to say that I'm running a private setup and that's is costly enough as it is while I'd be happy to upgrade if the cost showed signs of getting cheaper some time soon.

Did you consider purchasing an SSD Hybrid? It's considerably cheaper, faster for reading though not necessarily faster for writing.

I forget who, but someone recently demoed a PCIe-based Hybrid solution that had a 100GB of Flash capacity, backed by a 1TB 2.5" drive (also mounted to the card). It's an interesting solution, and one would think it would be pretty smart about caching your most-used samples. You might look into that (assuming you have a desktop, and not a laptop) and setting it up exclusively for samples in order to make the best use of the cache.

Then perhaps you could get a smaller flash disk for OS+important software, or just run the rest off of a mechanical drive.

Windows does that with ReadyBoost. Now Intel has something even better, which I mentioned, Smart Response Technology (SRT), which is built directly into the chipset and can boost performance by as much as 400% to a regular hard drive.

Unfortunately, it only works as a cache, so the operations have to be repetitive. So if you load a brand new game, you won't see a performance increase, but if you load the game a 2nd time, the entire process might be cached to the SSD. If you load level 1, some of the process will cache, and if you then load level 2, you may still see a high performance increase because of the access of similar resources.

However, I'm not sure how this works for things like video compression or sampling. If you access repetitive data, it may speed it up tremendously, but if the data is brand new every time, there may be no gains. This article suggests video editing shows no real performance gain, http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1587/5/ (but see the other tests confirming how much more awesome this is than a 10k raptor drive). Here is another test that shows some video editing, http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=2593&page=5 .


One thing is for sure, price to performance nothing is going to beat it. A 64GB SSD you can get for $100, and you can get a 1TB drive for $75. That's $175 for 1TB of super fast storage.