I am thinking about installing a Solid State Drive as my OS drive. The only problem is the ridiculous price of an SSD, and since right now I could probably afford to get a 32 GB SSD, space would quickly become an issue once I install Vista Ultimate and a few application. So here is where I would like to get some opinions,

Would it give me a big performance boost by installing an SSD as the OS drive or make the SSD a Readyboost? drive for Vista. Also will using an SSD take the load off of system Memory, I would think so, but I might be wrong.

There is one article where TH has covered by installing an SSD in a laptop, which gave a significant performance boost.

So let me know what you guys think about this option.

Solid State drives cost way too much for the performance gain. Not worth it. If you absolutely must have your operating system boot faster (because we all know the world is going to end if it doesn't load in five seconds or less!) just put two regular hard drives in raid 0. Much cheaper, same benefit.

If your running it in a laptop, there would be a lot of advantages. Speed and improving battery life would be two. I think the size would limit the advantages in a desktop, especially since you can run raptors in Raid 0 for less and have more space and excellent speed.

I might consider buying a 32GB SSD for OS and a few apps for $200 tops. No way I'm spending more to shave a few secs here and there.

RAID-0 can't get all the speed benefits of a SSD but it will get you the load time benefits.

I agree with deuce the cost way out weights the benefit unless your talking about a laptop and you have money to burn. When they come down in price they will be a great alternative, for now I'll stick with my raptors.

I was also thinking about the 32Gig one, just because it costs around 160 - 180 I think and see if it does make any significant difference. But a 32 Gig would fill up in no time.

Still some thing I am considering, what do you guys think about using that as a Vista Readyboost option ?

Just get a regular hard drive if you are getting a laptop. Chances are you are not running any ridiculous applications that would benefit from the ssd. Also, power consumption has come a long way, I believe they have batteries that will even last you well past eight hours, and if you are running low, it's called a battery charger.

If you are getting a desktop, just do raid 0.

Readyboost is a much more sensible choice over ssd if you absolutely need faster load times.

http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 532-6.html

it's a hard drive not a flash drive, readyboost wouldn't recognize it as a flashdrive even though it's made up of flash memory.

Consider the new VelociRaptor in the meantime? Not sure if they are out, but wouldn't be an option in a notebook anyway, per the review on Tom's a few days ago. 7200rpm, 8mb cache notebook drive would probably suit you just fine. And give you much more storage space.

The performace difference between Raptor and SATA are not that significant for the price and NOISE level of the Raptor, at least this is my opinion according to reviews.