Quote Originally Posted by 'alcattle',index.php?page=Thread&postID=167710#pos t167710
The prices have really dropped since you first wrote the review. Would the >$100 upgrade be noticable on a 1 HD system? The HD is newer, SATA II 3.0. Most are rated at 100MHZ read which is the one used in WOW.
Yes, prices have changed a ton in 6 months. However, for our purposes, the only specs on the SSD we really care about is access time and read transfer rate to be overall better than 10k rpm drives. The specs on the OCZ Solid 30GB SSD for $75-90 look fine. I've installed two of them into computers I've built for people, and although I didn't get to test it out for more than a day, it appeared to work just as well as my 64GB model. Since WotLK only uses about 12GB, 30GB is plenty for now.

100MHz? You mean 100 MB/s? Many inexpensive SSDs are rated at 150-170 MB/s and are SATA 3.0. The higher-end SSDs (like the Intel X25-M 80GB for $400+) are 250MB/s. Also, SSD's don't get slower as data is read further from the center of a disk like standard hard drives. The real benefit is that the SSD random access time (time it takes to find and start transferring a file) is around 0.1-0.3 ms, while the fastest 10k rpm drives are just over 4ms. Since this is latency, lower is better. Some people like to point out that SSDs have a limited amount of writes before blocks of memory are no longer usable, but I've had quite a few standard hard drives fail over the years due to use. Since we're not going to be doing much writing to the drive (only during patches/expansions), this negative aspect doesn't matter.