We're getting there slowly, I reckon I could probably have a 256gb operating system, pagefile and game drive and not need more for many years.

My TV shows, movies etc I'm fine to have on a slower, older drive.

Speed is nice but the price is more important. Most main boards these days got RAID controllers and are only waiting to run several cheap SSDs.

An example: 120GB 2.5" SSD drive with 155MB/s read and 90MB/s write speed for £216 (street price) from OCZ. You get:

240GB RAID (2x) with 310MB/s read and 180MB/s write speed for £432, or
360GB RAID (3x) with 465MB/s read and 270MB/s write speed for £648.

Comparing a new SSD in its press release with a 15k HDD and without an exact price sounds like it is getting a huge price tag. So even when the big manufacturers are designing these SSDs as 2.5" laptop drives will they soon be selling as desktop, workstation and server drives, too.

What about the painfull random writes? Are they fixed in those drives?

Is it worthwhile to run your operating system off of a smaller, high performance SSD and the rest of your programs from a regular hard disk for fast boots and such?

How much "writing" does the OS do compared to the programs you run?

This is much better, the gap in read and write performance is the main technological reason I wouldn't want other SSDs (the price is the main reason though).

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The high end Intel SSD X25-E seems to beat those speeds according to this http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=12918846&postcount=12

I have a different model Samsung SSD and I can tell you truly that it is much, much, much faster than any 15krpm disk ever made. You can do stuff like apply service packs or zip up the contents of your entire disk without even noticing any performance drop in launching programs, saving files, etc.

yikes. I'll wait until I see random-write performance test results, though. Hopefully, this really does give the X-25M as much of a run for its money as the specs indicate.