Well I mean, I have movie/game/music collections that take up a ton of space. I'm really wanting that faster more reliable kind of performance, but with more space for all that stuff. Am I out of luck entirely and have to go with 7200rpm drives instead of SSD? I am wanting to use higher end emulators and games that require more system resources, so it became a concern of mine to get a faster, and more reliable drive to use.
A 60GB drive is usually enough, with however much you need for storage.
Say ~15Gb for OS, that leave 45GB for games/whatever else. You mentioned emulators too, they don't need massive HDD speed, so they will be fine on a standard hard drive.
It isn't about what you use a lot, it is about what you use a lot which could benefit from the extra speed. I listen to a lot of music, but that is on a slower, 5400RPM drive, because whether on an SSD, a high RPM HDD, or a slow HDD, music will play the same because it doesn't have much data to transfer.
The same is true for small programs. An SSD may half the time it takes to open a small program, but when it only takes 2 seconds to open anyway, that would be wasted space, 1 second difference isn't a lot.
Now your OS, which will take 10 seconds rather than a minute to load, a game which will take 5 seconds rather than 20, that is a large difference, and remember it isn't just starting your OS or your game. Having your OS on your SSD will make all programs included with the OS run quicker, and in games, every map load, every save, when exiting the game, all of it will have times improved greatly
