You can do all the research and reading about it, but in the end if you decide not to get one you really don't know how utterly different they are in practice to a HDD. How could you? It is a quantum leap, not an incremental performance boost like when one moves from a 5400rpm to a 7200rpm HDD. Capacity too small? That's also incremental, relative. After all only a few years ago, 120GB was huge on a notebook! What has changed? Maybe media files and how many. You may want 500GB, but do you NEED it? Not unless you have scores of big media files everywhere you go. And why 500GB? Why not 1TB, or 5TB, 100TB? I know plenty of people who need 5TB and more! Why? They store DVD's. It is just an amount that creates its own new uses. My last notebook lasted 5 years, and started with a 60GB HDD, and ended with a 120GB. Did I really need 120GB? Not really. It was only half full. Plenty of room for three operating systems plus 10 years of data files. Most of my files are word and web documents. I have 100's of high quality photos too. But how many is a lot? How long is a piece of string? How far is a star? It isn't a jukebox. My new notebook came with a 160GB 7200rpm HDD. Did I really need the extra space? It was now half full plus another 40GB spare space free for filling, that's all. The extra space didn't make any difference. It did no harm; no good. What did I notice? The speed of the faster-spinning HDD and improved acoustics of a more modern drive. How can one notice the addition of space one doesn't yet need? I swapped for a 120GB SSD. 120Gb was just as much enough as it had been on the old machine. Still plenty; plenty to spare. The spare one doesn't notice. To me the more storage you have the more you can (and probably will) suddenly lose; and the more you have to back up on yet another drive. What is nice is a silent, none-vibrating, cool-running, SSD, impact-resistant. Would it be nice to be 250GB? Sure. Essential? No. (and of course, most SSD's come in 250GB as well as 120GB) Maintenance? Even if these things went at half speed, they would still blow any HDD out of the water. Has there been any difference in the performance of my SSD in 5 months continuous use? None that is noticeable. SSD's are no more essential than a new gpu or cpu or lots of storage space, or lots of ram. A 10-year old computer still does lots of things just as well as the latest. I have one. But is an SSD ready for ordinary use? Sure it is. I can't recall the same amazing leap since going from floppies to HDD's.
I entirely agree that if you absolutely need 320GB+, then best wait a bit. But the original question was an "average user" with 160GB. I would think they would be deliriously happy with a 160GB Intel SSD after using a 160GB HDD - just as I was moving from a 120/160GB HDD to a 120GB SSD. The abiding issue, and it is for most average users the only sticking point, is cost per GB. Performance will gradually increase even further, but the biggest increase will be in affordability. It is the unaffordability for the average user of bigger SSD's (like 250GB) that leads many of us to remain with "small" SSD's, or else stick with medium size (compared to desktop 3.5" HDD's) HDD's.
The Internet is full of posts by people who had issues with Intel's latest SSD drivers and Windows 7.
Firmware is just a hardware 'driver' (a driver that resides and runs on the hardware). Let's not split hairs with definitions.
That's exactly my point with SSDs on the whole.
By now I would say the SSD technology is pretty safe, I been looking to buy an SSD for about a year now, and I came into the game quite late.Thanks for the link. Worth a read - even though it's a bit long.
