Why are you not using a SSD yet?

Hard drives are much more likely to fail without warning than SSDs. Modern SSDs use wear-leveling along with spare flash cells to increase reliability. To give one example: Intel warranties their X25-Ms for 3 years. They claim you can write 100GB/day for 3 years without exhausting the flash cells.

The typical failure mode for a hard drive is for it to work fine and then completely die. No reading or writing, just dead. Flash cells usually become "stuck" after too many writes, turning an SSD into a read-only drive. Compared to hard drives, SSDs are much more tolerant of vibration and shock. I've had several hard drives fail, but no SSDs die on me.

Most importantly, I cannot overstate the performance benefit. Any machine without an SSD feels broken to me. Considering how much time most of us spend on our computers, $300 amortized over the life of the SSD is completely worthwhile.

For a desktop, a 147GB, 15k RPM harddrive, bought second-hand, is the price-performance-reliability sweet spot. For example, a Seagate Cheetah one generation older than the current.

Also, because I've been using XFS on it. With journal on another drive, performance is blazing fast -- and yes, including mass deletes of small files.

XFS used on the only SSD (cheapest one, admitably) I have was performing terribly -- because it has to do lots of random writes

And no, a 15k RPM is not noisy -- both thanks to good bearings and human ear not being very sensitive at that frequency.

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For a laptop, sure, the available harddrives (7.2k at best, often even 5.4k) have terrible random access times; an SSD may be way better. But not on my desktop, not yet anyway.

No it's definitively not an outrageous amount of money.

I have a 3 year old Thinkpad T61p with a still decent Core 2 Duo and 4 GB of ram. After three years it felt kind of slow so I had two options: 1) Buy a SSD for 250 Euro or 2) buy a completely new laptop for > 1000 Euro.

I went the first route and after working with the SSD for half a year I'm pretty sure that an expensive new laptop with a traditional hard drive would not have resulted in such a tremendous speedup as the SSD did.

So please don't think of the 200$ for an SSD as "these 200$ will buy me a new hard drive" but instead think of this investment as "these 200$ will buy me an awesome new computer".

Because the performance improvement still isn't significant enough (for me) to spent 200€ on a 64 GB SSD instead of 80€ for a 2 TB HDD.

This article is the typical case of buyers euphoria... he just got his brand new toy a week ago and now wants to push it on everybody else regardless of their preferences. And he doesn't even own the thing long enough to find the bad sides.

I do this too. The SSD is effectively another layer of cache, but one that has to be managed manually. I wonder how difficult it would be to write a filesystem that does this automatically.