[rarestia]

operations such as booting Windows 7 and launching applications were compared between a PC equipped with a 500-Gbyte HDD (5,400rpm)

Well THAT'S part of the problem. I use a 10K RPM disk for my system partition, and my boot time is under 20 seconds.

Granted, I'm using Ubuntu with a high-end system, but I'm assuming by the picture that this test was done on laptops where 7200 RPM disks are a little pricier.

[utherdoul]

ssds are still too rich for my blood. I’ll probably go with a hybrid drive for my next box.

[antiRepublicrat]

Well THAT'S part of the problem. I use a 10K RPM disk for my system partition, and my boot time is under 20 seconds.

I had a friend who booted off of dual 15K drives striped in a RAID 0, hooked to a pretty hefty SCSI RAID card with gobs of cache. It was impressive, everything was practically instant. Seems there's no limit to what people going for the ultimate gaming rig will do.