1- Most people overestimate what they need for storage. You can stream all kinds of media now and sure that’s not everyone’s thing but it seems like a decent sacrifice for the greater performance benefit of a SSD.
2- No $300 PC is going to be a high FPS gaming machine, if you understand how computers actually work you get an understanding of why an SSD makes such a difference. It’s not going to display frames faster in a game because the game is already loaded into memory but considering that any $300 laptop is not going to be loaded with graphics memory and not a lot of system memory you’re going to be using a pagefile on Windows (swap on *nix) an on-disk memory in a way. This effects all applications not just games and it’s a serious problem for hard drives that will make you think the $300 laptop is just crap when a simple swap of a single part would make it feel much better.
3- On a similar note a computer by design is constantly reading and writing to storage mediums and sure an SSD is not going to bump up your CPU benchmarks, it might not effect your framerate much or at all but if you actually use one you know that it’s a massive difference in day to day use. Everything feels much faster.
~ @Shellcode
Well, this will be fun.
1. When I am assuming things, I mention it. You are assuming here he doesn't need the space, even though he decided to get a 1TB HDD disk instead of the original 320GB. Seems like a conscious decision with a plain purpose to me.
2. I never said it would be a high FPS machine and you have also proven my point that swapping to an SSD would not improve his FPS only application loading speed and overall responsiveness. I know you want to show how smart you are with your very specific "pagefile on Windows (swap on *nix) an on-disk memory in a way", but maybe you should stop for a second and actually think when does Windows use that type of virtual memory. When the available RAM is not sufficient enough. Guess what, he got a Laptop with 16GB of RAM. I am sure he'll be fine with most of the games that laptop will be able to run.
3. Yes, everything seems faster (yes, I do actually have a setup with a SSD/HDD used for system/data and a laptop with a hybrid SSHD for caching) and it is hella convenient, but definitely not a necessity and not a "massive" difference as you are trying to sell it. Again, I am repeating myself, but for a guy with a 300 dollars budget for a laptop there's no point (or means I would assume) in getting a SSD and replacing his existing 1TB HDD.
You are telling an amateur astrophotograph to get the newest, shiniest CCD on his telescope. Yeah, it would be freaking awesome and super convenient, but he doesn't need it :)
