I was going to say, I would be surprised if SSDs were more expensive there than here, given that PC hardware is generally 1.5-2x the price here.
As far as the warranty goes, I agree that it's not a good way to determine reliability - also, the 840 Pro has a 5 year warranty as it is marketed as a premium product like the WD Black, the Evo and 840 Basic have a 3 year warranty as do most standard SSDs and HDDs, including WD's non premium lines. There are good and bad SSDs out there just as there are good and bad HDDs. Put it this way - in the 18 months or so after Intel released their X25-E and X25-M drives, which I think we can agree were some of the first mainstream drives with none of the drawbacks inherent in the earlier, poorly designed Jmicron based drives, we had precisely one go faulty that wasn't caused by e.g. a bad PSU or someone physically damaging the drive. That was the lowest return rate of any product. In my experience, "good" SSDs like Samsungs, Plextors, LiteOns, older Intels (not the Sandforce based ones) and Crucials seem to be more or less as reliable as a "good" HDD. "Bad" SSDs like, again just in my experience, Sandforce based drives (OCZ Vertex/Agility 2/3, most of Corsair's Force line, Intel 330/520, Sandisk, etc) are less reliable, but it's hardly luck of the draw - it's just a case of doing some research before buying a drive to see any potential problems.
My 3 year old desktop can boot to Windows in 40 seconds, and pretty much every program loads in less than a second. Except Firefox, but then I tend to start it after boot and leave it running all day. However, the prices are getting so low now.
That's fair enough, but bear in mind your desktop is not only half the age of the laptop I'm talking about, it also has 2 more CPU cores, a higher clock speed, more memory and a newer chipset, and it's still taking nearly 3 times as long to boot. 40 seconds is a great result from a HDD, but logically programs will also take similarly longer to load as long as they're depending on I/O and not CPU power - if that makes any sense. Installing programs is similarly fast, or how about Windows updates? I was updating a laptop with a HDD the other day to prepare it for my uncle, and boy did it take forever. On a system with an SSD even those ridiculously long .NET updates aren't quite as bad. I'm somewhat struggling for comparisons to make as the only system I use day to day with a HDD is my work laptop, and I don't use that in the same way as any machines at home, so I can't compare those directly, and a lot of the tasks I really notice the difference in, like installing Windows in 10 minutes or so, aren't exactly everyday tasks. Also, I wasn't expecting to be discussing SSD vs HDD speed - not that that's a bad thing, I'm happy to discuss anything related to the topic here, I just came ill-prepared
there are several good SSD vs HDD comparisons I've come across on Youtube which I found interesting though, showing the real difference. Really, I've found the only way to properly appreciate the difference is to try one for a few weeks, then go back to a HDD in the same system. I did just that, and never looked back.
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