That WD 3 TB drive would be absolute shit to use as a drive. 5400 RPM. It'll take a week to boot your computer with that after everything is loaded.
Also, we didn't even calculate power usage. Less than 1 watt for an SSD vs 10 watts for an hdd. Easily 10x the electricity usage!
Also it is more like 190$ for a good 3TB HDD :
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B2UWTHE/ref=twister_B00DI12GSMWhich is almost in the price range of a 480gb SSD.
If you get the right software and check the work hours of your HDD, you will see that this 9watt difference is a lot.
Oh, you wanna talk about good HDDs, let's take a look at more enterprise/fast drives. For a proper 600 GB SAS drive, you're looking closer to ~$300.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148617&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-na-_-na-_-na&cm_sp=&AID=10446076&PID=3938566&SID=That's actually a damned good deal for that drive. Last year, they were closer to $400 each.
It will make a difference but not as much as you're suggesting, games developers have a nasty habit of just putting as much junk and shit as they can without taking into account what it will do with peoples computers, don't get me started on the bloatware DRM that they throw in. Why do you think games like Skyrim work really well compared to other games? It's because they took the time to make sure things work for the most part despite the bugs and glitches in the game, unfortunately there are so few modern examples I can give because of the complete lack of optimisation in games now.
Battlefield 4 is a classic example because they threw tons of physics into that game and lots and lots of particles/polygons so that forces the computer to work a lot harder which is why only high end computers can realistically run it at a comfortable pace and it takes so fucking long to load.
Skyrim as your example? Are you drunk? Look up comparisons in loading times. Also, bloatware DRM? Are you fucking serious. 1 MB file = total bloatware.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Absolutely no idea. Seriously, now physics are using the disk rather than the CPU / video card?
You probably think you mine BTC with storage too, right?
I honestly don't and I don't think the cost/benefits is worth it, like I said, the larger games take longer to load because they're larger, not just because of the hard drives, maybe in a couple of years when SDD hard drives are as cheap as HDD but not now.
Go read this:
http://www.storagereview.com/ssd_vs_hddI spotted this awhile ago actually but it explains things well, if I make money I might, just MIGHT spend money for a 1TB SSD to see how things go but I'm not holding my breath.
That site kinda proves our point more. The only thing they have going from them is cost / GB which is nullified about after a year anyway (due to differences in power usage).
thnkx.
Sure a 1TB SSD drive could well be worth it in a couple of years time when they get the costs down but yelling at me about how great a 120GB SSD drive is when you'll barely fit 5 games on their on top of your operating system is a fucking joke.