I took the plunge and replaced my desktop storage with a pair of Intel 330 series SSDs. Even running over Firewire, the boot drive is a good bit faster than the internal drive (iMac 27"). I don't notice any difference speed wise for the data drive.
But it's
quiet. OMG it's such a world of difference. When it boots, the internal drive comes on (there is a way to stop that, I just haven't done it yet), but ejecting the internal drive makes it shut down. It's one of those things where you don't realise what you're working against until it's gone. Shut that drive down and suddenly you realize just how high the background noise level from that stupid spinning disk drive was!
Relevance? Sometime since starting to try and do more serious listening at my desktop, I realised that the background noise level could be lower. I had no idea how much until I actually did it. It's odd - almost creepy to do work now without the internal drive in the iMac whirring and clattering away.
Doing this might mean reducing storage usage. I consolidated a lot of things, decided to live with a subset of the music library on the desktop machine (I can always stream or copy albums from the music computer when needed), and am still working on which NAS to use for remote storage of archival data, mostly photographic files.
This may not seem newsworthy, but it's such an amazing difference I thought I should post about it. If you listen at your desktop, it may be worth consideration.
