Are Solid State Drives worth buying?

SSD's get faster and faster every day. If you want speed you need them. It's not a bad idea to invest in one, but only if you have the money. If you can't afford it, don't buy one. Normal Hard drives are also very fast. Not as fast, but certainly not slow.

Also if you have windows 7 the degradation is very low, because of a feature called trim. For as I know only windows 7 has this feature.

Just saw an article that might make businesses think again: SSDs "difficult" to securely erase

From my experience thus far with them in other machines (not my own), yes, the read speeds are nice and fast. You can open 50 programs in 3 seconds.

However, try using that drive as an OS drive or a scratch drive for programs such as Photoshop, Vegas Studio, etc. If you're using Windows let's say, Windows writes to temp files almost every second...this will, in fact slow the OS down with an SSD.

...yes they are getting faster and faster, but the write speeds are still not yet fast enough for me at least to go out and buy one.

The other issue you have is life span. At this stage of the game I would NOT rely on them as a "storage" device. Maybe an OS/app drive, but not for long-term storage and use on an everyday basis. Reason being that if a mechanical HDD fails because of the logic board, or power, the PLATTER still has all that data on it, and granted, it might take a few dollars, but you could get that data off that drive.

SSD's...say you have a freak power surge that goes through your home, completely goes right through the surge protector (assuming you have one on your machine - you'd better!).....those are all flash chips. One good "ZAP!" and well...all you have at that point is a hunk of cheap metal and plastic, and some smoking black chips. The data is gone.

Not trying to scare you off on your decision, but some things worth thinking about if you're going to invest the $$$ in one.

Yes. If you have the money, then definetly. The speed of SSD's is considerably quicker than that of HDD's. For an example, I can open my After Effects CS4 from a SATA drive running at 8000RPM in around eight seconds, but on an SSD, on one of my other computers, I can open it in around three seconds, just an example.

If you have the money, go for it. I plan to get one in the near future as an OS drive, and then just use a large RAID 5 array for data.

I only get 64GB ones for my servers and gaming PCs as they will drop fast in price soon.

But yes Windows7 benefits a loooooooot with SSD powering it.

they are for me, my laptop is currently on its 5th drive.