[ahaslam]

I also agree that spending on RAM will get you more bang for the buck - speeding up the inherently slow paging process before trying to prevent it in the first place doesn't really make sense, especially considering that a RAM upgrade will likely be cheaper.

I recently spec'd and built a new machine including a 110Gb PCIe SSD. As expected, it's pretty impressive for the low latency but it is also expensive and there's a couple of points worth mentioning about the general experience:

What I have noticed is that at these limited sizes, it's not long before your SSD volumes are maxed out and you end up having to choose and manage the datasets that reside on it - so a new PITA to deal with.

What also surprised me is that the technology was still a bit flaky - I had to tweak not only my BIOS but Windows 7 to use it reliably.

Even when that was sorted out, the flaky impression was reinforced when I tried some conservative RAM overclocking on the i7 Extreme - to find that I was starting to get FS corruption issues. So I now have a bank of fast RAM running at some fraction of their potential in deference to retaining FS integrity.

I'm not sure whether these issues are a result of the engineering required to address the SSD over PCIe - maybe SSD's accessed over SATA don't suffer the same issues.

So SSD is promising but not there yet.