Have you considered adding a small solid state drive to boot your operating system and applications from? My latest pre-built PC came with Windows installed on a 64GB SSD, and it loads up really quickly. I'd wager it extends the life of the PC too, since you're limiting wear and tear on the hard drive by not using it to boot from.
some good points, though I'd recommend getting at least a 256GB SSD if you do a lot of gaming. Incidentally, I was just hard drive shopping last night and after a bit of research and deliberation I decided to pick up this Crucial 256GB at just north of $100.
3 years ago I bought a 120GB SSD to use as my primary partition and I've run it's capacity to the limit. Consider that 40GB is not an unusual size for many modern games with high-res textures. For me, a few games combined with all the Adobe programs I use and I'm constantly having to monitor my usage of that drive.
The main annoyance here is that I've had to install additional programs/games onto other drives, which in some cases can cause issues with data and/or player file locations. I've also had a few errors pop up through Windows that were results of this. IMO It's just easier to have everything installed on one drive, and cost is low enough for a 256GB drive that it's worth it.
Another consideration for SSD is that they're apparently much more difficult to recover data from if you ever have a failure and have to go down the path of sending it to a recovery service, but yes they should be more reliable (though I've heard arguments). So at this time, the common recommendation seems to be to keep file archives on standard HDDs but run your OS and programs from the SSD. Cost is obviously also a factor in this, as SSDs larger than 1TB get in the $1k+ range, whereas a 3TB HDD is about $150.
For speed though it's a no-brainer, there's no reason to build a rig these days and not install your primary partition on an SSD.
Edited by bachamn, 29 October 2014 - 05:38 AM.