[coldtea]

>The entire point is that pretty much any other (read: non-Apple) laptop/desktop you buy nowadays is going to come with at least 500 GB, and generally 1 TB nowadays.

That's for non SSD drives. So every other laptop/desktop you're gonna get with those storage sizes also has rotating rust disks, with are more volatile due to moving parts, have much worse read/write speeds and are noisy.

[pabb]

>That's for non SSD drives.

Yep, clarified in my edit.

>So every other laptop/desktop you're gonna get with those storage sizes also has rotating rust disks, with are more volatile due to moving parts, have much worse read/write speeds and are noisy.

That's cute. So now hard disks are so obtrusive, fallible, and out-dated that they're literally not an option anymore? I think some people have such a love affair for the acronym SSD that they forget, disk access is still hundreds of thousands of clock cycles regardless.

See: http://imgur.com/pQ8BriQ

SSD benchmarks are clearly better than HDD all around, but not by the orders of magnitude that you seem to believe.

[coldtea]

>That's cute. So now hard disks are so obtrusive, fallible, and out-dated that they're literally not an option anymore? I think some people have such a love affair for the acronym SSD that they forget, disk access is still hundreds of thousands of clock cycles regardless

A time N improvement is still better that no or marginal improvement, even if it's not 2 orders of magnitude better.

It makes all the difference between waiting for 5 minutes for some IO process to finish and waiting for 1 minute. 1 second would have been nice, but 1 minute is already a game changer.