Anyone have SSD on VIAO FW - worth the extra $?

Looking at customize build a new FW, the 128GB SSD is about $120 more expensive then the 7200 RPM 500 gb drive. Just wondering if this is worth the upgrade, and what kind of performance I can expect to see? My biggest hard drive intensive task is editing WAV files in SoundForge, this can be quite slow with a mechanical hard drive.

 

If the SSD you are planning to get is of a reputable (check reviews) brand, then you will be more than satisfied, as hard drive itself is the slowest part of any computer (AKA bottleneck). After getting my laptop with SSD I will never come back to conventional HDD's. PROS: No noise, no heat, fast!

 

On a different thread, I asked a question on who the manufacturer of the Sony SSD drive was. As we know, there are HUGE differences between the SSD drives available in the marketplace.

Based on a feedback on that thread, one suggestion was to go with the cheapest hard-drive that comes with the FW CTO model, and then buy a high capacity/high-speed SSD drive separately (Sandisk, OCZ, Intel etc make top-notch SSD drives) and replace the hard-drive in the FW with the SSD drive.

By adopting this approach, you will not only gain a higher capacity SSD than what comes in the Sony CTO (512GB etc vs the 256GB max via CTO), but also a higher performing one. The Sony SSD is supposed to be from Samsung, which is way out-done from a performance perspective by the Intel and OCZ SSD drives. The aftermarket SSD from these companies could also prove to be cheaper than the lower-capacity/lower-performing SSD that comes via the CTO process.

Just an alternate suggestion. Of course if the question is whether SSD is worth it, then I would say absolutely.

Read through the below in-depth SSD writeup, which goes into a lot of depth on SSD drives and also compares the various drives available.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531