So solid state hard drives (SSD) are starting to descend into almost affordable territory – the popular Intel x25m 80 GB drive can be found for ~$250, which is actually less than I used to pay for drives measured in megabyte capacities back when I started building my own machines. They’re blazing fast at most things compared to conventional drives. The capacities are of course much smaller than regular drives, but folks are following a scheme of installing the OS and the most critical apps onto the SSD and everything else onto a large capacity conventional disc. Supposedly this will lead to a bigger performance increase on the machine than most anything else, including a faster cpu. I’m working on the parts for a new Windows 7-based machine, and stuck on what to do for the disc, cpu, motherboard and video card. The SSD is really the toughest call. I get that it will sleep and restore from sleep virtually instantaneously, which is actually the big draw for me (not that the boot speed and application launching speeds aren’t appealing as well), but the price relative to a conventional disc with 20x more space for 1/2 the price is sticking in my craw. Which way would you go if you were me?