Yep, all good points Allen - agree with those.

It's all about balance really. Some games suffer from 'worse bottleneck', in that once you have a decent CPU with a few cores, and a GPU with enough memory and a bus wide enough to keep things moving then the I/O is the next thing to hit. Games programmers avoid disk as much as possible but some games (especially those designed with consoles in mind, unfortunately many today) don't really take full use of modern PC memory. A consoles 'working set' of memory is often only 512MB of RAM, something a PC user would laugh at. When a game does that and 'pages' in more data (Skyrim, ME3, the usual big titles) then the SSD makes that as that the 'best least worse ' bottleneck it can. In sims where they page in data it can help too, as they'll always be faster than a HD that they might be designed around and that really eliminates those 'pauses' that can break immersion sometimes when things are being loaded/process on the fly. In badly coded titles, like say IL2 CoD (sorry MG), they really help a lot as the lack of optimization can at least be burnt-through with a well balanced system.

Just like slow memory can kill a systems perf, or an older graphics card can not fully use your CPU potential, the SSD has come big and cheap enough to be another weapon in the arsenal of fighting 'which bottleneck is next'.

Between 6am and 9am EST, Newegg Shell Shocker (go to their home page) has an SATAIII 120GB SDD for $130 delivered. That's the price -- no need to send in a rebate coupon (as I had to). On paper, Specifications equal or slightly better than mine. Of course, I don't know first hand -- so, the individual buying must make the decision.

P.S. That Shell Shocker Sandisk SSD (above post) got a good writeup (assuming this is the same unit).

Sandisk 120GB Extreme

The comparisons are done between the hard drive that I had DCS A-10C installed on versus the new hybrid drive that now has my A-10C installation.

Both drives are on SATA II interfaces.
The older hard drive (C:) is a Seagate 2 disc 4 head 500 GB ST3500418AS. Was about $70 in Jun 2010.
The hybrid drive (F:) is a Seagate 2 disc 4 head 500 GB ST95005620AS with 4 GB of SLC NAND Flash. Is about $150 at Best Buy.
--- edit ---> Both of these drives are 7200 RPM.

Using my iPhone stopwatch.

I first compared the the start up times for the A-10C sim. I found that the first time the sim is started after a computer restart the time was about 4 seconds longer on the older drive - therefore I am only comparing times of additional A-10C starts following the first start.
Older hard drive / Hybrid
16.6 / 8.2
16.5 / 8.2
16.8 / 8.3
16.7 / 8.2

Here is a compare between the older drive and the hybrid using a mission I designed.
--- edit ---> This mission file is in my \Users\(my name)\Saved Games\... on the older HDD
The times are from within the Mission Editor and the Fly to Fly buttons (after pressing the Fly Mission button) -
Older / Hybrid
64.0 / 35.2
64.0 / 33.9
64.0 / 33.8
64.0 / 33.9
64.0 / 33.9

Then I did Mission - Kashuri Gap on the Hybrid -
--- edit ---> This mission file is in the A-10C installation on the Hybrid drive.
36.0
36.1
36.2

Pretty happy with these times. The hybrid is a nice improvement over the older HDD. Note that the only thing on it right now is DCS A-10C. Win 7 64 bit is on the older HDD.

WC

Yup, cutting the time in half is significant and noticeable

Your hybrid load times are within a second or so of my SSD load times. Interestingly, the HD load times are quite a bit longer.

FWIW, I've been playing Mass Effect 2 (not 3). Have it set up for both HD and SSD. Since its not a Steam game, I can switch back and forth at will (takes a couple extra steps to switch with Steam). Game load and level load are noticeably slow with HD. Unfortunately, with SSD, loading the game and loading a level "feel" about the same (even though the load is a bit quicker on SSD). With SSD some conversations are less smooth -- the way the game is coded, the on screen text arrives too soon from the SSD -- giving the impression that the speaker is hesitating.

FWIW, I forgot to mention that both my system and game HDs are fairly new (say... 2 year old technology) SATA III, 64MB, 7200RPM on SATA III ports. The SSD is SATA III on an SATA III port, as noted above.