Is it worth investing in a SSD (solid state drive)?
 

The bottleneck to the speed of a PC is almost always the hard drive..
I need to get a new drive soon since the one I have now is getting pretty old

My options are the new Western Digital Velociraptor which is apparantly the fastest hard drive, or a solid state drive.

Any suggestions?

I wouldn't until they fixed the limited number of read/writes......granted it's a huge number but even at a huge number it will fly through it when you take into account how many times the drives get written to or read from....cool technology just not "cost effective" yet

Prices are suppose to come WAY down in the next year on SSDs, and they are working on the read/write problem hardcore. Something about stacking the bits or something. I'd go with a normal drive right now, but I buy new drives every other month, so I might not be the one to ask. I will be getting a SSD in probably about 18 months as my main drives in all my computers.

The technology seems promising but doesn't seem like it is ready for demanding use yet.

I don't see much benefit at the moment, mostly in a laptop currently.

The limited numbers is only writes and you will be able to write continuously at rates of 100MB/s for over 40 years with one of the latest 128GB flash drives (1 million write cycles)... It is likely that issues other than write cycle will cause failure first :2 cents:

On my laptop, where I often need to shut down/reboot SSD is life changing.