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I am a bit of a latecomer to this discussion... (Only just found the Computer and IT forum in its new location!)
I thought I'd share my experiences of SSD drives, as some people may find it useful. TBH most people will probably find this post incredibly dull! However, I certainly would have approached the whole thing differently if I knew what I know now about 60GB SSD drives!
SSD drives are indeed awesome - however, a couple of things worth considering before you take the plunge:
1) 60GB may seem a lot, but if you're running Windows 7 it's really not. I have been running 2 almost identical machines, both booting Windows 7 Ultimate from 60GB SSD drives, for about 18 months / 2 years. In both machines the SSD drive is a system drive, used only for the operating system and the Program Files for some (but by no means all) of the installed software. In both cases, the system was drive effectively full - 55GB used on one, 58GB on the other - after 18 months.
The main culprits were the Windows 7 system files (~20GB), 18 months of Windows Updates (12GB), Application Data (11GB), a 5GB page file, plus the storage the operating system assigns for users' files (Documents, Downloads, etc).
This is all manageable and default locations can easily be pointed to another local drive. But that requires some configuration, and you have to have a bit of know-how to get it all working nicely (especially if your 2nd drive is encrypted - see below...).
I find that I now need to think carefully about where I save things / download things / install programs / etc. You can't just accept the defaults without thinking about it. If I was starting again then, during or straight after installing Windows, I'd configure the default locations for the Users folders, Program Files, downloads, Windows Updates, change the environment variables for the system- and users- temp folders, etc... all to point at somewhere other than the SSD drive. It's a pain doing it all retrospectively, but you don't have a choice if you get to the stage where there's no room left on your system drive!
2) My work has a policy that all machines must use drive level encryption. However, this is a really bad idea when using a SSD drive. There is a long and dull explanation about why you shouldn't encrypt an SSD drive (if anyone's interested, Google "wear leveling"). It dramatically reduces the lifespan of the drive. Both of my SSD drives are now on the way out. I am getting frequent blue-screens and boot errors.
Also - because my 2nd (non-SSD) hard drive also has to be encrypted at drive level, it requires the user to enter a password before the files are accessible. That means, when the system boots, the operating system can't see the second drive and consequently any programs installed on it are unavailable until you enter the password. Which isn't too bad until you find you have programs installed on the SSD drive which run at start-up, trying to access data on the second drive, which effectively isn't there...
It's a monumental pain in the ar5e.
I suppose the easy solution to most of my issues would be to buy an SSD drive that's big enough to hold everything. However, at about £1 per GB, that ain't cheap! (It's about 10 x more expensive that a traditional HDD if you're looking at 500GB - 1TB.) And you still can't encrypt it.
If you do plan to run a configuration where you have a (smallish) SSD system drive and a 2nd drive for storage, it's well worth spending a few minutes thinking about how it's all going to work in, advance of installing Windows. A bit of up-front planning will potentially save you a lot of hassle 2 years down the line.
All that said; the performance benefits of SSD are incredible. Despite my problems, I won't be going back. When my SSDs eventually die (which will probably happen quite soon), I will definitely be buying similar (although bigger) replacements.
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. Everything I do now is almost instant. I can't see me going back to mechanical drives after this.
